Kids love fire. Kids always want to help their dads build a fire in the fireplace. Kids can't wait to learn match tricks, Zippo tricks, and that thing they learn in the Scouts with the twig and the twine and the dried-out leaves and the pretty pretty flames that call to them, "Kid? Oh, kiiiiiiiiid -- come to me. Set me! Plaaaaaay with me." I too heard the siren song of burning stuff. All kids do. It's not that they want to destroy things or hurt people; that's the last thing most of them want. They want to watch stuff burn, though, and at one point or another, your child is accidentally going to melt or sear something in the service of that desire. Maybe it's a Dixie cup. Maybe it's the heel of her shoe. Maybe it's a small patch of kitchen counter. Declare a semi-annual Supervised Conflagration Day at your house and let them do it where you can keep an eye on things. Buy a fire extinguisher for every floor (you should do that anyway, or so I read). And see what I said last time about hiding things. Putting matches in a twee little canister on top of the fridge is just asking for a house filled with the stench of singed Barbie hair. Trust me. No, no, no -- trust me.

Actually, in my case, it was a pile of garden trash and a bamboo stand. In my defense, I would like to say that they never said that I couldn't burn the garden trash when they told me to get rid of it, and they'd been complaining about the bamboo stand forever. (Um ... OK, burning the bamboo was kinda sorta accidental. But still.) And I'd seen the neighbors burning trash, so I knew you could do it.

The fact that the fire department eventually got involved was just a small bonus.

Nothing besides the trash pile and the bamboo stand were harmed. Although the back fence was slightly singed.

And the advantage of the neighbors having done the same thing the day before (without, of course, the whole fire department thing) was that nobody had to ask why I'd done such a damfool thing. A win-win situation! (With, you know, the odd bit of being grounded until college, but them's the breaks! And after all, they didn't mean it.)