I love fires. I can build a fire outside in most conditions.

We'd just moved to town. And here we were in our new house on a cold evening. A fire would be just the thing. I didn't have much in the way of wood.

That fire took easily enough. Turns out building fires in still rooms and on dry stone hearths only requires a tiny bit of paper, a match and a stick of any kind of dry wood. One strike of the match, and you are in business. You don't even have to open the draft.

Then the living room starts starts to fill up with smoke. I could see it was a fire that would burn itself out, so no possible way it was going to burn down the house. But still, there was all that smoke. I called the police department, not 911, to ask for advice or help. That officer told me to call 911.

The street filled up with fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances, all ablaze in flashing lights. I sent the kids upstairs where they wouldn't be in the way. My house filled up with hunky men, come to the rescue of the newest resident in town.

Turns out, when you make a fire indoors, especially in a fireplace that has a clay chimney, you have to get the updraft going by sticking a burning paper torch up into the chimney to warm it. All the smoke was in my living room.

We could all breathe easily standing upright. We were never in any danger.

One of the hunky men nicely showed me how to get the updraft going.

Another nicely told me that sending the kids upstairs during a fire event was pretty dumb.

Welcome to the neighborhood.

This is my entry to @mariannewest's daily freewrite challenge. Yesterday's prompt was chimney.

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