Fires

I was thinking about fires...     

How comforting and what fond memories they bring on one hand and how devastating they can be on the other ....

Think how long a child can sit burning the point of a stick and writing on a rock with the blackness, or how good roasted hot dogs and marshmallows and smores taste. How long people can sit around a campfire and talk. They were always in my plan if I got lost because they would keep away the scaries and bring help. (It is one of the things I miss from moving to Arizona- too big a risk of destructive fire) I love the crackle, the smell, the flickering lights, the colors...it is mesmerizing. I enjoyed teaching cub scouts how to cook bananas, eggs in onion shells or paper cups, tin foils dinners (still a favorite). We also used to burn our household dry garbage in the burn pile or barrel--that is frowned on or illegal now a days. We kids used the soot to mix with water and pave the roads we had made near the chicken house. Black mud basically. I also remember melting lead in tin cans and then molding it ... for what I don't remember but I thought it was really cool. There were the scout contests too to see who could burn a string through first, I guess a contest to build a good fire and to start one without matches. I loved it when Dad and Mom bought the ?"Hurricane Fireplace" that was in the living room with glass all around, what a great idea. Dad also made fireplaces that heated the house. Grandma DeCoursey (Ottie Garber Rhodes) had a wood burning stove well into my life time....I liked put split wood into it by getting the doohickey that opened up the circles on top so you could add enough wood to make the right heat to cook whatever....no matter some of her cooking burned.

 

The destructive kind ...all around every year but those didn't personally effect me. However the one in the pictures of the granary would have if I had been older, the one where the haystack burned for days I remember, I remember when the lightening struck down the road and followed the electrical lines up to the house and blew out the wires...I woke up to Mom's voice saying "fire?" I didn't hear the thunder but I guess the rest of you did. I remember having the forest rangers wake us up in the middle of the night near Silver creek and tell us to evacuate immediately....we packed up and while driving away could look back and see the flames reaching the top of the mountain from the other side. When Gerald and I lived in Boise we had a neighbors house burn down when the owner tried to clean up the grease spots with gasoline in preparation for the new owner. Here we have had three neighborhood houses burn but was only aware of one while it was happening....big flakes of ash came floating down into our yard. A wheat field burned while growing up too...one near Grandma DeCoursey's house and there was a possibility of it jumping the road and getting the house. Gerald remembers the empty field near their house that was burned about once a year accidentally by one or the other of the kids. One of our neighbors burned because a grand child wanted to see how the fire lighter worked....he was there after named "Sparky".
I don't like smoke or even the smell of smoke unless very light...but I do like controlled fire and am looking forward to having one in the back yard while the kids are here and roasting marshmallows etc.