Smoked Ham

There were many times I narrowly escaped death. One of those times was in fifth grade. OK, it wasn't that serious, and maybe I was partially responsible for causing the dire situation, but I was in fifth grade. Every kid gets into some kinda trouble every once in a while. heehee

My brother and I were often dropped off at the local library on weekends and were expected to finish our homework, read or play quietly for several hours. This particular weekend one of our friends, Pearl, came along. After we did some work, we wanted to go run around outside.

We decided to play house in the library's clusters of pine trees. My brother was the Dad, Pearl was the Mom and I was the baby. Pearl and my brother gathered pine branches and made a tee pee of sorts. I was given the responsibility of lighting the fire for dinner. The fact that "the baby" got to play with fire tells you none of us should be parents. Ever.

Don't ask me where we got the matches, we just had them. The three of us learned very quickly that pine needles burn quite easily. Within seconds our tee pee was filled with smoke and then became ablaze like nothing we had experienced before. We tried to throw dirt on top of it, but of course the ground was covered with fallen pine needles... I'm surprised nobody saw the billows of smoke coming from the trees behind the library.

Pearl grabbed my most favorite sweater in the whole wide world, my pink Miss Piggy sweater, and started smothering the fire with it. Amazingly, it worked. When the fire was out, we stood looking wild eyed at each other. I was torn. I was relieved the fire was extinguished, but I was sad my sweater was destroyed.

Brother: Let's go back inside and eat our snacks. (Looking at me) Don't tell Mom about your sweater.

I didn't and she didn't even notice it was gone.