All these very serious problems with wild fires have brought back to mind a little wild child, my brother. What? You will ask. What can possibly be the connection?

After four girls, my baby brother, the fifth kid, was (and is to this day) the prince of the bunch; an adorable child with mischievous eyes and a particularly adventurous nature. Like my own little rascal a couple of decades later, my brother was attracted to danger, to the point that after several bumps on his head due to rough encounters with hard edges, cement shower floors, stone steps and the like, the pediatrician urged my mother to make him wear a helmet at all times.

One of my little brother’s main attractions was FIRE! For some inexplicable reasons, it seamed to spring from nowhere wherever the little boy happened to be… I remember about the corner of a rug in the living room, when he was less than two, that all of a sudden caught fire…my mom recently told me that she can’t recall that time; it is known that our brain chooses to forget some of the importunate episodes of our lives…

What we all remember is the time when on a month of November we were in the country side; the days where short, the weather cold and a warm fire was cracking in the dining room’s fire place. How idyllic, right?! Except…near the fire place a sorghum broom had been forgotten: my brother, still a toddler, grabbed it by the wooden handle, put the sorghum side into the fire and when it had lit, started chasing the youngest of his four elder sisters around the dining table. At her screams the next one up run to help her only my brother was now chasing the both of them. The next sister run to their rescue…my brother was now chasing the three of them. Then it was my turn… And it all happened in seconds. To make a long story short, when my mom arrived to check what the whole ruckus was about, the scene in front of her must have been scarily hilarious: her four girls were chased around the dining table with a burning broom by their little brother, a toddler…

And what about the time when during a summer in the country side an elderly aunt of my mother was visiting for tea; the two of them where chatting when the elderly lady told my mom, “There is a fire in those bushes behind you.” Not to be disrespectful, but mom’s aunt was pretty old and my mom thought she was seeing things… Mom proceeded to offer her another cookie, but her aunt insisted and mom felt compelled to turn around to make her happy. Sure enough, my brother, probably around 4 at that time, was near a burning bush and proudly declared, “I made a fire!“

The broom’s episode aside, to this day it is a real mystery how my baby brother was able to apply fire to bushes or carpets, apparently from nothing. Our mom was running a pretty tight ship and, although rules were looser than they are today, with five active children roaming around things like matches were certainly not available to us or left unguarded. In addition to providing a helmet for him, my mom should have tied a fire extinguisher to my little brother’s belt!

Have you ever felt a certain discomfort taking your constantly bruised child to the pediatrician? My little boy was always into some venture of his own making and, having a tendency of bruising easily, often looked like a Dalmatian.

Let alone the time I left him male bonding with his dad while preceding them back home with his younger sisters from a vacation on the mountains, when he fell from a branch of a dead tree that broke under his bouncing weight… The little rascal was keen to get physically into trouble and his little body was a constant reminder of his exploits.

At 18 months, while still living in the city, my toddler managed to swallow a largish button I had set aside on a high shelf; to this day I have NO idea of how he was able to get to it! I run him to the emergency room where they made sure the button had gone through him the right way and told me I would eventually find it at the exit end…While I was collecting the results my little fellow busied himself opening every door around us and chatting the nurses. I was reassuringly told, “To next time, Mrs. B!” At two, as soon as we moved from the city to the suburbs my guy broke his front baby teeth coming down from a slide face first. Then there was the time when while running on a little friend’s backyard he fell bumping his head on a stone step requiring several stitches, from a plastic surgeon, no less. Not to speak of his brilliant idea, around four, of jumping into the low end of a pool head first, hitting the bottom of the pool and braking several front teeth-yet again!- two days before leaving to Italy for the summer. Around 12 while riding a horse with his dad (am I repeating myself?), he had a difference of opinion with his equally dunderhead mount about from which side to pass a large, thorny bush…when I went to pick him up after the ride, I didn’t have to ask who had won!

You will understand my discomfort when once, at the pediatrician office, the doctor called, “Sue, look at these!”, for his nurse to witness my daredevil’s several bruises?! Thank goodness the pediatrician and Sue had known me for a couple of years by then, and didn’t call the police on me for child abuse, yet. The reality is that the abused one was I, the poor mother, always on alert, concerned and suspicious of my darling boy next move!

I grew up in a large extended family which includes several cousins; each of us five siblings had one or more cousins of the same age. Some of my most fond memories are the ones of the afternoons in grade school when after classes our moms would take us all to our nonna‘s on the hills of Florence for hours of outdoors playing and some of the most incredible homemade merende (afternoon snacks). Those truly were unforgettable days!

Also our children have enjoyed their numerous cousins during their summer and winter vacations in Italy and Switzerland, but at home in the States things have been quite different for them. In the U.S. it has always been just the three of them. All things have their positive and negative aspects; my children greatly missed having their cousins to play with regularly, especially knowing that they had several around their age in Europe. Once my first born, while in the third grade, asked me, “Can I pretend Andrew is my cousin?” Of course he could, but I understood his sense of loss.

On the other hand, the fact that our children didn’t grow up each around cousins of the same age resulted in a closeness between them that my siblings and I, perhaps because we could always rely on other kids to play with, didn’t need to create between us. Their relationship has always been deeply special; they have always been there for each other, learning daily from life and each other at the same time in a way that I have never witnessed in any other set of siblings, here or abroad. My friends have expressed utter disbelief when told that my now adult kids would explore the West Coast from Seattle to California for a couple of weeks on a trip together; by choice just the three of them!

Oddly enough we probably might have to thank the much suffered absence of an extended family around us for the fact that our children are each other’s best friends and ours is an especially tight knit family.