When I was almost 5 years old, I was burned badly: 3rd degree burns over about a third of my body. At least that was what I was told later. I have no recollection.
In those days, people often burned their own trash, because there was no civic trash service. My family read a lot, so much of our burn barrel was made up of paper. Paper does NOT burn well, so stirring it up a bit with a stick would help incinerate it. As I stirred the trash in early March, the wind blew some of the burning paper out, and it came to rest on my clothing which immediately caught fire. As a kid, I ran and fanned the flames until my Grandad ran me down and threw me to the ground and finally extinguished the flames. A big chunk of my right trapezius muscle was lost, as was the hair and skin behind my right ear. The surface of my back burned mostly down to my belt. In my small town in those days, there was no plastic surgery, so all I had to endure were the frequent changes of the bandages, which apparently was quite painful.
Having experienced this, it is a bit surprising to me that I love fires. In Lexington, VA we burned a pot-belly stove to heat part of our house, and I ran it for three years all winter. In GA we had the pot-belly and a large black heater in a back room. I burned those for 4 years, harvesting a lot of stove wood off a section of land that UGA cleared for campus expansion. When we moved to AL, I hoped to burn wood, but our living room fireplace was so old it had no lining, so burning wood was totally unsafe. I never got around to getting the fireplace fixed, though I did get a bid of $6000 to get it redone. We moved to Allums which had an unvented gas heater that I enjoyed, but when we moved to Lakeside Pl, at last I had two safe fireplaces. We quickly removed the old gas logs and installed a high-tech top-of-the-line QuadraFire wood insert.
And, I love it. More about that next post.
In those days, people often burned their own trash, because there was no civic trash service. My family read a lot, so much of our burn barrel was made up of paper. Paper does NOT burn well, so stirring it up a bit with a stick would help incinerate it. As I stirred the trash in early March, the wind blew some of the burning paper out, and it came to rest on my clothing which immediately caught fire. As a kid, I ran and fanned the flames until my Grandad ran me down and threw me to the ground and finally extinguished the flames. A big chunk of my right trapezius muscle was lost, as was the hair and skin behind my right ear. The surface of my back burned mostly down to my belt. In my small town in those days, there was no plastic surgery, so all I had to endure were the frequent changes of the bandages, which apparently was quite painful.
Having experienced this, it is a bit surprising to me that I love fires. In Lexington, VA we burned a pot-belly stove to heat part of our house, and I ran it for three years all winter. In GA we had the pot-belly and a large black heater in a back room. I burned those for 4 years, harvesting a lot of stove wood off a section of land that UGA cleared for campus expansion. When we moved to AL, I hoped to burn wood, but our living room fireplace was so old it had no lining, so burning wood was totally unsafe. I never got around to getting the fireplace fixed, though I did get a bid of $6000 to get it redone. We moved to Allums which had an unvented gas heater that I enjoyed, but when we moved to Lakeside Pl, at last I had two safe fireplaces. We quickly removed the old gas logs and installed a high-tech top-of-the-line QuadraFire wood insert.
And, I love it. More about that next post.
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