Fire, Fire!

After an unsuccessful weenie roast in the jungle, Alice and I decided to try our cooking skills in her back yard, very close to the house. We had seen barbecue pits - the ones built with bricks and mortar with spits for roasting whole chickens and other things - so we looked around under the house and in the shed for some bricks for our project. (The house was not underpinned, and we would often crawl under the house to hide. We could not quite stand up under the house, but there was a clearing of 3-4 feet where we could walk around stooped over and spy on other people who were passing by on the sidewalk.) Our pit would not be as fancy as the ones we'd seen in magazines, but nevertheless, it would be perfect for our purposes. We just took the few bricks we found and laid them end to end to make a little square on the ground. Armed with some more matches and the goodies for our weenie roast, we lit a match and threw it inside the square. Now, Mississippi had had a pretty dry summer, so the minute the flame hit that dry grass, it lit up like a 3-alarm fire. The whole area inside - and outside - the bricks started burning, and this time we had failed to bring a pail of water. All we could find was a quart jar to put water in and throw on the fire. A teenage girl who lived in the other side of the duplex saw what was happening and ran to get a hose and managed to put the fire out. Boy, were we relieved! We never dreamed that the fire could get outside those bricks, and we never thought about having to explain a charred section of the backyard to Alice's parents and were quite surprised when they asked us about it.