Sticks and stones...

Sticks... Fire.

I was recently thinking about a friend I had when I was young. Maybe six or seven years old? (I seem to have a lot of memories from around that age and younger.) She told me she knew how to make a fire and I wanted to see. I would never make one because I didn't know how and I knew it was dangerous. But heck, if SHE knew how and had done it before...

She said she shouldn't because she'd get in trouble and her mother would hit her with a spoon (apparently it was a large slotted spoon that hurt.) and I, being the good friend that I was, continued pushing her to make a fire anyway and just not get caught!

She did eventually. (How horrible am I? But I was so curious! I thought it would be so cool to have a small little fire with sticks! Like a campfire! But smaller!) We got a few sticks -twigs really- she cleared away a small section of grass, which I didn't even realize was something that needed to be done. She really had done this before, and I was learning a lot! Once there was a small patch of opened dirt, we put the twigs in and she nervously lit some matches. She was very quiet and kept looking up to see if her mother was coming, -afraid she was going to get caught.

I had no fear at all. It wasn't my parents. I'd never been caught playing with fire and whacked with a spoon, so I didn't have a real frame of reference for that. I didn't think at all about her. My thought was "She knows how to do it, she's done it before, just don't get caught and you don't get hit by the spoon! No big deal!"

I'm sure this is the part where you're expecting me to say that something disastrous happened and we learned some valuable lesson. - Sorry. It didn't. She made a small fire, I was TOTALLY impressed, then she put it out less than a minute later, covered it with dirt, and we went back to the rest of our play date.

As I've been writing this, and remembering how quiet and hesitant she was, I've been thinking about how terrible I was and what a bad position I put her in, pressuring her like that - I did keep pushing her to do it! And yet, if memory serves me correctly, (and I believe it does) she had the matches already in her pocket! I think that's how the whole subject came up!

Gosh I hope no kids read this!