Fire in the Hold

As I was doing some clean up today, I took the paper garbage down to the burn pile to get rid of it. It had been piling up for some time and there was quite a load. Last year at this time, we were using the wood stove to get rid of burnables. However, in order to renew our insurance we had to have 'a guy' come and look at it. He took about five minutes (and our 135$) to tell us not to use the stove - even though it works fine, he told us that there was "this and that" wrong with it and therefore, in his informed (and expensive) opinion, it was best to let it become a place to showcase collectibles.

Therefore I am resigned to using the burn pile instead. Every once in a while, I become more environmentally aware and recycle but today, I needed to get rid of the garbage without making another stack somewhere else in the house.

As I set the fire, I thought back a few months ago when my husband went away for the weekend. I began cleaning and got so" fired" up with motivation, that I decided to get rid of the two hide- a- beds we had. They were in bad shape. I had advertised them on "Freecycle" and there were no takers. I figured that the local thrift shop wouldn't be interested in them either. They'd 'had their day' as my mother would say. So I convinced my #1 son to help me drag them out to the burn pile.

It turned out that this process was quite therapeutic. It was educational. And it was also a little dangerous.

We dragged them out and piled them on top of each other. My son put the hide- a- bed mattresses inside one of them and lit the match. At first, we didn't think anything would happen. Then we saw a flame.

Once the flame took, a rip-roaring fire developed in about thirty seconds. It was shooting up flames thirty feet into the air . Now, we were a little scared. We hadn't anticipated the height of the flames being so high. The sparks began to fly upwards, teasing the power lines.

This called for immediate action.

PRAYER.

It was the "Prayer of the pathetically uniformed". "Dear God, I never knew that couches would burn so fast and so hot and so high....Have mercy!" I imagined for a moment trying to explain to the firefighters how it was that I set the whole farm on fire with two couches. "Pardonez moi? Je m'excuse, je ne peux pas parler l'englais"....Then I imagined informing the landlords about the fire. "You know how you always hated how little space there was in the dining room? Well, now you can renovate it!"

The fire was white hot. It was a crisp late-fall night but we were extremely hot due to the raging flames. We moved farther away and tried to decide on the best course of action...... MORE PRAYER and a little garden hose. The hose stuck. This meant we had uncoil it little by little, unraveling it as we did so.

As we began unsticking the hose, the flames began to recede a little. We watched from the pump house, prayed some more; this time asking forgiveness for not thinking through the process properly before we lit the match. Thankfully, all ended well. The flames died down to a dull roar, the hose was unraveled and put back on the hose bib and we went back into the house and looked at the empty family room and congratulated ourselves on creating space. [And breathed a smoky sigh of relief]