When I was eight years old, my cousin Katie taught me how to light a match. My parents had gone out for the day and turned to Katie as a suitable baby-sitter.
Together we sat on my front porch striking matches against a box, blowing them out and tossing them over the side of the house into the bushes below.
…Recipe for disaster, right?
Actually, no. My house did not go up in flames that day. Instead, a spark ignited in my heart for all things ablaze; candles, bonfires, grill lighters, magnifying glasses in the glistening sunlight, I wanted a part in all of it.
I am sure that when Katie was teaching eight-year-old me the ways of fire-making she had a good reason for it. She probably wanted to increase my chances of survival should I ever be trapped alone in the cold wilderness with nothing but my wits and a box of matches.
But if at some point during her lesson she revealed her rationale, I wasn’t listening. My undeveloped child-brain processed nothing but the magical glowing flames that I was now able to create with a box of matches and the mere flick of my wrist. Something inside of me changed; a sense of power and awe took over. Fire good.
Fast-forward a few years to a cool breezy Columbus Day weekend when my cousin, Jillian, and I were roaming the streets of my greater-Boston hometown with a neighborhood friend, Cherise.
The boredom of an unsupervised twelve-year-old can easily turn into catastrophe. We soon proved this after deciding on a plan to keep ourselves entertained.
Together we had great fun lighting the candles and blowing them out, dripping wax on logs and throwing burnt out matches on the ground until, surprisingly, one of our used matches sparked a flame among some of the many crunchy dead leaves littering the floor of the woods.
After about ten minutes, however, we had mistakenly lit one too many leaves at a time and not even our awesomeness was able to destroy the flames that ensued.
Luckily, Cherise ran to her house to grab something to put out the flames. Unfortunately when she left the fire looked like this:
And then she came back with this:
But by then the woods looked like this:
Then, appearing out of no where, a short, hairy man came to the scene and started beating the flames with a broom. I am not sure what he was thinking this would do, but clearly it wasn't putting the fire out.
At that point, we did what any responsible preteen would do:
We ran to my house, sirens screaming past us in the opposite direction. Inside, my mother and her friend were quietly catching up on each other’s lives before the three of us came barging in; rambling and out of breath like three incoherent meth addicts who just ran a marathon after getting their teeth drilled.
This was the obvious moment where we had to deny our responsibility.
Strangely enough, my mother was onto us.
Jillian had cracked. She couldn’t take the guilt of lying for more than thirty seconds and spilled everything.
Cherise continued to lie out the door and ran home while Jillian and I were left bracing ourselves for a punishment that never came. It turns out that my mother also lit the woods on fire as a kid while playing with matches. Clearly it was in my blood-- and you can't blame a girl for something in her genes, can you?
