Our farm caught fire on New Year’s Day, and helpers poured out of the scrub. It’s given me fresh hope for 2025

‘The fire gobbled up the wheat straw in its path like an amorphous red and yellow monster.’ Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

On New Year’s Eve, a couple of geniuses got together to do some circle work in their cars on our backcountry intersection.

They burned their tyres down to the rims, leaving behind tell-tale circular grooves in the bitumen just near the kids’ old bus stop. They may or may not have been the same people that lit a few fireworks at the same spot on the same night. Someone left the packets behind.