I was excited and couldn’t stop moving around. My mother, trying hard to button my coat, exclaimed with exasperation, “Hold still!” From where I stood in the farmhouse entryway, I could see through the back door window to a snow covered back yard that I wanted to play in. Turning my head slightly to the right, I could see a pan of freshly baked cookies on the top of the stove. The smell of them made me want one so badly that my mouth watered. Tying a scarf tightly under my chin, Mom exclaimed, “There! Done! Now you can go outside with the big kids.”

One of my brothers asked, “Can we take cookies with us?” Mom got the pan and held it out to us. We each scooped up a warm, sweet treat before turning to leave the house.

Although I wanted to play in the fluffy, white, fresh snow, I dutifully followed my brothers and sisters to the backside of our farmyard. The boys put down bags of household garbage on a small pile of wood scraps and dried weeds. Striking a match, my brother set the kitchen garbage on fire.

The bright orange flame revealed what was in the bag as it burned. I watched it devour a bloody paper that the butcher had wrapped around the stew bone Mom was using to make soup. It delicately licked at a brown apple core, then turned it black before finishing it off. The fire warmed my face as I got closer to see what the flames would do to an empty soda-cracker box. My eldest brother snapped, “Back away from the fire, Kathy. You’re too close to it!”

My other brother warned, “If you get too close to the fire, it’ll burn your head off.”

One of my sisters commented, “If Kathy burns her head off, she’ll have to wear a kettle where her head used to be.” Everyone snickered when she added, “We could call her Little Miss Kettlehead.”

I had no intention of getting any closer to the fire. I didn’t want to be devoured like the toilet paper rolls and old newspapers. But I couldn’t help loving how the flames did their work.

When I was old enough to walk to the woods at night with my neighborhood cousins, we would make a campfire in a stone-strewn ravine. We piled the rocks to make a hearth. I enjoyed making a big fire with a stack of branches we found under the trees. Then, we baked potatoes and corncobs in the coals. It was dark by the time we toasted marshmallows. A circle of Daddy’s milk cows softly mooed and snorted as they watched what we were doing. In the firelight, all I could see of them was their large, flat faces, rubbery noses and big, iridescent eyes. Walking home later, through their cow-pie mine-field made us all want to burn our shoes.

One of my married sisters and her husband moved into a house with a fireplace when I was a teenager. I was excited. The idea of having a fireplace in a house seemed so amazing. If I lived there, I would have wanted a nightly fire. Mom found directions in one of her woman’s magazines and made newspaper logs for her that would burn many different, pretty colors. Much to my disappointment, I never got to see if that worked.

My love for watching bright, dancing, orange flames has not gone away. I still regularly make backyard fires in one of my fire pits, which are really tree stumps that I’m trying to burn flat so the lawn mower doesn’t have to go around them. I’ve had a lot of fun and an amazing amount of success in doing this.

I like how the flames leap and dance, as I feed them my junk mail and watch the unwanted pages blacken, curl, then combust. It reminds me of the fascination and delight I felt as a child, standing by the burn pile, watching brightly colored cardboard butter-boxes surrender to the hungry flames.