The Roemke Review: Last Week of July

Hard to believe that July is already over. This summer seems to be going very quickly. Here are a few pics I took this past week.

First, the sad pictures. On Tuesday evening, our local hardware store burned down. It's just down the road from us. We heard sirens that night, but they sounded kind of far away to me, so I didn't think that much of it. Then when Jim went to work the next morning, he saw that Main Street was closed off and that the hardware store was still burning.

There were so many fire trucks you could see them from our house. And this was the next day.

I thought it was a foggy morning, but it was smoke from the fire. I panicked once, because I could smell smoke in our house. I didn't realize it was coming in from outside. The air was thick with smoke all morning.

This is what it looked like Wednesday afternoon. The only thing left standing was the front wall.

And this is what it looked like Thursday morning. Completely gone. The fire burned so intensely that fire crews couldn't get inside to battle it. They could only shoot water at it from the outside. The damage was so massive that they aren't even able to do an investigation into the cause of the fire. They just ruled it an accident.

You can see straight through to the pond that lies beside the river.

It's so sad. Middleville is a very small town and there aren't many businesses here. The hardware store was kind of an institution around here. Jim was on a first-name basis with the owner, Bill, because he was in there about twice a week buying little things. In fact he was in there the morning of the fire buying new pegs for the bookshelf in his office. The owner had a popcorn popper and customers were always able to help themselves to a free bag of freshly popped popcorn whenever they went in. We really hope they are able to rebuild it. The carpet store next door was damaged as well, but not as bad as the hardware store.

Now onto happier pictures!