How not to start a fire

I found a video on You Tube that reminds me of watching the dancing flames inside my Blaze King Princess wood stove. I never get bored watching that stuff. It’s always been like that, even as a kid when we had a fireplace. It wasn’t a fireplace insert, just a regular old fireplace, so it didn’t heat the house very well. We always relied on the furnace for that, except during winter power outages when the furnace was knocked out of commission.

One night, my mother and a friend of hers decided it would be fun to have a fire in the fireplace. The wood they gathered from behind the house was wet so they had trouble starting the fire. The friend suggested using gasoline to get it going. My mother thought that was a fantastic idea so they drenched the wood with gasoline and threw in a match. The wood ignited great, so did the carpet and the curtains. The white-painted brick surrounding the fireplace turned black and my mother’s eyebrows disappeared that night, too.

They had to stomp around pretty quickly to get the fire out. After that, whenever we walked across the carpet it made a crunching sound.