Another day, etc.

Ah you know the rest! Not that I made any money but my trip to the Dr. turned out O.K. even if I had to go on Dial-a-Ride! Everything O.K. he said! Thank you Lord! Let's see, I think I'll go on about setting the whole hillside on fire! My folks owned 160 acres of land and a lot of it was quite hilly and a lot of creeks running through it, (we had to get water from someplace to grow the wonderful things that we grew!) To make a long, long story short, for the 4th of July we pretty much spent it at home on the farm. We had a huge yard in the front of the house with green grass all the way to the road. Lots of trees, bushes, and Mom's flower garden. (she had a flower garden like a nursery no matter where we lived!) Dad and Mom bought us firecrackers and we shot them off in the front yard on the 4th, and we always had a picnic in the yard. Dad told us about a certain type wood that he called "punk wood" that would just smolder enough for us to light our firecrackers. This wood, when it started to die down Dad would "smoke" it and it would come to life again. Not any flames just that smolder. Well a few days went by and we, Genevieve, Bob, Laurence, Teresa and myself were playing house in the front yard, and we decided that we would be sophisticated people and "smoke" our cigarettes, etc. using the punk wood as cigarettes! Where Mom was, I don't know (probably doing one of a hundred or more chores around the house!) but I'm sure she would not have let us use matches to light this punk wood! (if she had known that we had matches we probably would have been tanned and not by the sun!) We sent Bob, my oldest brother down to the creek where this wood grew beside it. Bob decided to "light up" before he came back and the next thing we knew fire was raging all over the hills behind our ranch. Of course we yelled and Mother came out and then ran back to the telephone and rang everybody's # and reported what was happening! She also called the wheat farmers at the top of the hills because if it got that far it could really cause more havoc that it did. Oh, I forgot, Dad had taken a load of fruit to town to sell and so he saw all the fire engines heading down from Pullman. He asked someone and they told him about a big fire up along the hill and so he finally got the answer to what was going on! In the meantime, my cousin Cecil who was five years older than me and who lived with us was cleaning up the pig sty up the road from our house and saw the fire. He soaked a bunch of gunny sacks and ran towards the house to see if he could beat out the fire. He joined Mother and by this time neighbors and relatives from all over were on the "fire lines", so to speak. Mother had told us not to leave the house and stay on the lawn till she got back. Dad got there too, and we just were scared to death! We got the bright idea of taking the beds and everything we could out of the house and putting them on the front lawn in a pile!!! Mother came home and Dad was still working to stop the fire!!! I would have, I think, just sat down and cried!!! Well the fire went as long as it could towards the river, but there were big orchards there and that stopped it and the firemen stopped it on the top of the hills so it didn't do any damage there. Mother calmly, or maybe not so calmly got us, with her help, to get the house back in order and cooked our dinner, etc. I don't remember getting punished for it, (I was the oldest and would have been the logical first one to get the punishment for something like that!) But I guess they thought that the scare we got was punishment enough!!!! Maybe that is why I never smoked!!! More later!