Kahboom!  I was awaken from a sound sleep, eyes wide open "What was that!?" I wondered.  I looked at the room and it looked as though the whole house was on fire, with the flickering of what looked like flames glowing through the windows.
  I was half afraid to look out the windows, afraid of what I might see. To save the rest of the family members I went to the window, and wow! What a sight to see. It looked as though the whole orange orchard behind the house was on fire.  Then, I caught a glimpse of somebody running through the orchard lighting smudge pots.
  It looked like a winter wonderland and the fires of Gehenna all wrapped in one. The frost glistened as the fire light from the burning smudge pots flickered out into  the night sky and through my bedroom window.
  We just arrived to the area in 1946 and had never seen or heard about smudge pots before and couldn't understand what was actually going on.  I had a great sigh of relief to know that the house was not on fire -- I would find out later what that was all about.
  At Daybreak, it was bitter cold outside and the air was so thick with soot you could almost cut it with a knife.  I hopped on my horse and rode out to hunt rabbits, that I would sell to the local Indians for 25¢ apiece, when I ran across Albert who was an Indian known to be from the Barona Indian tribe but he worked and lived at the orange orchard next to our home in Bostonia.  He and his family lived in a small yellow cabin on a narrow dirt path, the location now being at Dawnridge and Cresthill Road just South of Pepper Drive.
  We both talked a bit and he explained that he and some helpers were always ready for the cold winter frost that came along around November and December.  This past night was at freezing temperatures and he worked all night getting all the pots lit.  On occasion when he clapped the lid on them to snuff them out as the temperature became warmer, sometimes a pot would backfire with a resounding kahboom and blow the lid up into the sky.  That was what woke me up.
  I rode home to get ready for school and explain to my mom what was going on.  As I walked in the door, her and my sister both started laughing at me.  As I looked at them I knew they were laughing at the soot in my nose. It seems like everyone in the valley had soot in their nose that morning.  How many of you remember those times?
  It seems to me those days were much colder.  Marcella Williams and I talked about the time it snowed in Lakeside and Santee.  We weren't sure of the date but it seemed as though it was around 1947 or 1948.  I remember freezing when we were youngsters waiting for the school bus to pick us up at the stop.  Old Albert felt sorry for us and helped a couple of us carry a smudge pot over to the

school bus stop so we could keep ourselves warm.
    There were two ol' fellers across the street who came out to their model "A" Ford coupe which was made into a pickup truck. They wouldn't bother to try to start the engine when it was so cold until they threw an oil soaked burning rag underneath the engine to warm it up.  After the fire went out they would hand crank her up and off they would go to work.  That was old Pat Vopat and Mr. Angle who worked on septic tanks together.  Some of you might remember Vopat's "Honey Pumper" running around town years ago.  How many of you readers remember going to school and everyone had soot in their noses including the teacher?