Mom brought a cake to the table and set it down. A single unlit birthday candle stood tall and proud in the center of the cake amid chocolate frosting. I clapped my hands with happy anticipation. We were celebrating my nephew David’s first birthday. He was born March 27^th, 1960, the year I turned ten. My brother-in-law had enlisted in the army amid the Berlin Crisis, so he and my sister, along with David, had recently moved away to an army base. Even though he wasn’t with us to celebrate his special day, I insisted Mom make a birthday cake for David.

Taking a wooden matchstick from a box, Daddy reached under his chair to drag it across the rough underside to ignite it. Suddenly, with an aggressive roar, flames shot out of the cold air-return grate next to where he was sitting.

Seeing large orange flames coming from inside the wall of my much-loved home, I jumped up from the table and screamed. As a ten-year-old, I figured that everyone was responsible for their own escape from the house. I ran from the kitchen, through the entryway, and out the back door. A few minutes later, my brother Billy found me standing on the sidewalk behind the house, sobbing. He said, “The fire is out. Everything’s okay.”

I returned to our supper table to find Mom had placed a serving of the birthday cake at my place. It was like nothing had happened. I felt confused and as though I needed to run around the block several times to get rid of the residual panic in my system. A few fork loads of frosted cake went a long way towards making me feel better. I hic-upped, “What happened? Why did the house catch fire? It happened so suddenly!”

Billy explained, “There was probably a lot of lint in the cold air vent. It’s March, so the furnace is still running. That keeps the lint very dry. We think a stray spark from the match set it off.”                                    

Mom said, “We all jumped to our feet when we saw the flames. Your brother Casper was the closest to the kitchen sink. He spotted a kettle full of water there. So, he grabbed it and dumped it onto the fire.”

 Turning to Billy, Mom asked, “Would you call what happened, ‘spontaneous combustion’?”

My brother shook his head and answered, “No, spontaneous combustion doesn’t need a spark to make something burn. Damp hay stored in a barn can get so hot that it spontaneously bursts into flames. That’s why barns often burn during the summer. The lint in the vent was just very dry.”

Mom commented, “I’ve never cleaned the return air vents since moving into this house eleven years ago.” Defensively, she added, “I didn’t know I had to. The old farmhouses I grew up in didn’t have vents like that.”

My current house was built about fifty years before my childhood home was constructed. I think there are only three air return vents in it, and I try to vacuum the two downstair vents at least once a year. Still, I’d never dream of lighting a match near them. Also, I would never put a candle for every year of my life on a cake. The number of candles I’d need to represent my age could burn down a house without there being any lint in a nearby cold air vent!

That evening after Daddy and Billy finished milking the cows, Billy asked me to help him clean the air vents. He unscrewed the grills from the walls but insisted that I was the one who should reach into the vents because my arms were smaller than his, and therefore able to reach farther in than he could. I pulled out handfuls of thick mats of gray lint. It felt good to make sure the shocking fire we had earlier in the evening wouldn’t happen again.

Little did my sister, and her family know what an exciting party they had missed!