I would like to address the ongoing issue of the backyard fire smoke in the Norway Hill Area.

I’m a “windows open” kind of person. I love to sit in my living room with the windows open and smell the cool summer breeze wafting through my curtains. Unfortunately, I’m rarely afforded that luxury because of my neighbors and their backyard fire pits and the constant plume of stinky smoke that arises and undoubtedly blows into my home.

Now, I am not opposed to the backyard fire pit because I, too, like to sit around the fire on occasion and enjoy a s’more or two, but it’s just the sheer amount of fires that are happening in my neighborhood is overwhelming. Almost every night someone is having a fire and that smoke does have to go somewhere, it’s not isolated to only one yard.

I understand that my neighbors have rights to enjoy whatever it is they like to do in their own yard, but your enjoyment of your fire pit is impacting my enjoyment of having my windows open and not having to breath in that stinky smoke. Don’t I, as the “window opener,” have rights as well? I’m just asking for a break in the constant barrage of smoke every single night. I just want to be able to sit outside on my own deck and breathe in fresh air not layered with smoke.

Please, please consider others when you are lighting an outdoor fire pit. I know this letter may fall on deaf ears because some will say “I don’t care if you don’t like it — shut your windows, then.”

So let me put it to you this way — how about if I take an air horn and blow it right at your house at 4 a.m. or take a spotlight and shine it into your windows at 3 a.m.? Maybe I enjoy the way an air horn sounds or I love the bright lights of a spotlight and I really don’t care if you don’t like it, because I do.

What would your reaction be?

Please consider your neighbors. Thank you!

When children

weren’t bored

I was born in 1925. I was raised in the ’30s and ’40s.

We didn’t have TV, cell phones, tablets — only radio, to listen to programs like “Buck Rogers,” “Orphan Annie,” “Jack Armstrong,” etc.

We had chores to do at home like chopping wood and carrying it in the home to fill the wood box, haul water in from the well for washing clothes, baths and the tank of the wood stove for warm water.

We found time to play baseball, swim and play games with other kids like hide-and-seek, prisoner’s goal and kick the can, etc. Lots of exercise.

Our homework from school was done on the table with a kerosene lamp. No students had a car at school. If we had any money, we earned it doing work for other people.

Yet, I never heard a child in my generation say, “I’m bored.”

It just wasn’t in our vocabulary.

Today, I hear children saying “I’m bored,” in restaurants, from my grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

It’s really pathetic.