All too reliably forecasted rain systems had avoided drought-stricken Palmville Township in 2023, and just taunted our crops. I had little reason to think these scattered showers would act any different. Disking my over-grown firebreaks on Thursday, April 11th, to help prevent the spectre of wildfire did the same thing as washing a car did long ago, for toward evening it progressively rained, sleeted, and hailed on me a quarter mile from home, forcing me to take shelter in a dense windbreak of white spruce trees north of the one-room Palmville schoolhouse; I loved the irony of it. It was a partly cloudy evening. I was disking a 16-foot wide north/south firebreak between the county road ditch and a 4-row windbreak that is almost a half mile long, using my old Massey-Ferguson 180 diesel tractor and eight-foot wide tandem disk. The firebreak hadn’t been disked for two years. I had lucked-out, fire-wise, hoping nothing would ignite the ditch and the grass-covered separation between it