There is anxiety along the picturesque, rolling wheat fields and pine forested draws of the Palouse in eastern Washington right now, where folks will tell you it looks and feels more like mid-July than the middle of May.
"Just a watch and see, [you] pray a lot," says Cindy LaMontagne. The dry winds have been blowing an unusual number of days, with little or no rain, which stirs up trauma for people like her who lost their homes in a fast moving range fire last Labor Day.
The Babb Road Fire destroyed 80% of all the homes and buildings in the tiny farming town of Malden where LaMontagne moved to be near her daughter and granddaughter in 2012.
Most of the couple hundred or so survivors were poor - Malden was a rare place in the region where housing was still affordable - and, like LaMontagne, they had little or no insurance. With nowhere else to go, she spent the winter living in a small travel trailer on her burned out lot.
"That was kind of touchy, some of the heat went out," LaMontagne says.