I woke up on New Year’s Day more sore than I have been in a long time.
Every muscle in my body was aching, especially my back and legs.
It felt as if I had foolishly ordered one of those workout programs off television and started with the most extreme DVD in the pack.
Amazingly enough, I had not lifted a single weight nor done a single pushup.
I had not even been to the gym.
It all started sometime between 7 and 8 o’clock on New Year’s Eve.
I was settling in at my in-laws’ home in Yazoo County, and we were about to watch a movie to pass the time before midnight. Across the pasture, on this very rural land, my wife and I saw quite the display of fireworks coming from the other side of the property.
Earlier in the day, I had been going over all of the exciting things that had happened to our family in 2017.
We moved to a new town. I took a new job, and we had our little Sarah in September.
We got to go to Atlanta to the first ballgame ever at SunTrust Park in mid-April, and I attended my first NFL game in December.
With just a few hours remaining in the year, I had mentally packed it in.
That was until my mother-in-law came running into the family room screaming about a fire.
At first, I thought the house we were in had caught on fire.
Then she told us to go to the cabin – a small house that sits in the direction of the fireworks display – and that the yard was on fire.
My brother-in-law and I jumped into his truck, and my father-in-law got into his. As we took off, we could see the glow from the fire, and I knew then that it was serious.
When we got there, the yard – which is basically a hay field - was indeed on fire.
The wind had picked up, and the fire was spreading toward the forest. It would have been nearly impossible to extinguish the fire if it had gotten that far.
First things first though.
We got just about every blanket in the little house and began beating the fire into the ground, putting out as much as we could until the volunteer fire department could arrive.
It felt like we fought this thing for over an hour, but it was actually only about 15 to 20 minutes.
We managed to beat the fire back enough to where it would not get to the cabin, and then we attempted to keep it from spreading to the trees.
Pretty soon, some members of the volunteer fire department showed up, grabbed blankets and began beating the fire, as the fire truck was still a few minutes away.
When the truck finally got there, somebody from the top shouted “look out Bryan!”
I looked up and got a dose of cold water right in my face.
As cold as it was that night, I couldn’t have asked for a better feeling than when it hit me.
One of the volunteer firemen, who was wearing a “Beat Bama” Mississippi State shirt, looked down and saw an MSU Bulldog blanket smoldering on the ground.
“That’s a shame,” he said.
We moved out of the way and let the professionals take control of the situation. They had the fire out in about 10 minutes.
When we got back to the house, we downed some bottles of water and other cold beverages, as we coughed our way toward midnight.
And the next morning, of course, there was the stiffness and pain that comes from that first workout of the year.
Even though I managed to get that workout in without going to the gym, it did serve as a wakeup call that I need to get into better shape.
I’m not going to be doing CrossFit or P90X anytime soon, but I do plan to incorporate more weight lifting into my routine.
You never know when you’re going to need to beat back a brush fire.
