I am man! I create fire! Fire is good!

Luckily, I went home for Thanksgiving. Mark thinks it's funny, but I had no idea how to start a fire. It's not something I had really thought about. How hard is it to start a fire? You light a match, and burn the stuff. It had never occurred to me that you couldn't just light a big log on fire.

It makes me sound incompetent, but really, it's just not something I've ever done. If nobody ever sat down and forced you to write the letter 'a' a thousand times in elementary school, you wouldn't be able to do it. Someone had to teach you. The only fires I had ever started were with the easy-light logs. The ones that that you simply light the outer package, and you've got a roaring fire in the fireplace for hours.

That is, until Thanksgiving. Mom has actual firewood. When my dad and I first arrived, her brother, my uncle Larry, was having trouble getting the fire started, so volunteered to take over the project. Mom thinks I'm a buffoon. If we sit down to eat, she wants to explain to me how to use a fork. She still thinks I'm 2. So, as with everything else, when I kneel in front of the fireplace, she comes out to tell me how to start the fire.

"Just use the newspaper to light it, and here in the bag you have smaller pieces of wood for kindling..."

Initially, I just nod as usual and accept that my own mother thinks I need help with every last thing...then I realize...I had no clue!

Had I gone up into the mountains like this, it's highly likely I would never have gotten a fire started. It was fortunate that I had come home for the holidays.