To dig out the rock, I need the trailer to put dirt in. Which means I have to get rid of the moldy hay currently in the trailer. Which means I need to throw the hay on the burn pile. The burn pile is in the pasture, so to make sure the horses don't get into moldy hay, I have to burn the whole pile right away. Easy, right? Ha! No.
If my husband did this job, he'd stuff some paper in between the dead sticks, throw the hay on top, and set it on fire. Whoosh! Twenty foot-high flames. A bit outside the fire code, but who around here really cares? No one.
Except me. That burn pile - two of them actually - have been sitting there for a year, drying out. The perfect shelter for bunnies, mice, skunks, and ground hogs. No way am I going to have toasted bunnies on my conscience. So I laboriously move every limb and tangled vine to a new pile, burning them as I go - a nice, responsibly small fire. (Yes, a girly fire. Girls are responsible; suck it, guys.) Going through both piles takes a good hour and a half, not counting forty-five minutes in the middle to recover from heat stroke.
And how many bunnies did I find? None. But I did uncover one large garter snake that slithered farther into the pile before I could whip my camera out. To help you play Where's Waldo, I cropped out most of the burn pile. If you look closely you can see her yellow striped black body weaving through the brush.
So I sweated in the August heat for 90 minutes to save a snake. Was it worth it? Heck, yeah. (Hello, do you know me?) And now my trailer is free so I can start digging out that rock.
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