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!