Fire in the Hole!

I had a minor and entirely “cosmetic” surgery on Monday (stupid cysts), and the strain of working full days under painkillers and then coming home to an amped-up Molli Malou (on vacation from Børnehaven) and exhausted Trine (home with both girls all day every day) has slowed me down considerably. The added excitement of coming home to a blazing fire on Tuesday night didn’t help. Hence the lack of promised videos.

* * *

In case you didn’t follow my Facebook chronology, the fire went like this:

It went like this: having survived a long and trying day at work, my first full day back after 3 weeks off and me all hobbled by my surgery and muddled with codeine, I was at last driving home (no hope of riding my bike, so I had to drive to and from the train all week – think you’re zeroing in on those cysts?). Trine had called while I was on the train and told me Molli Malou was down the street playing with the neighborhood kids (water balloon and water pistol fights) while she and Maddie were relaxing in the shade on the terrace, and had even promised to have an icy cool glass of diet cola waiting for me. It sounded like the perfect peaceful end to the day. But as I turned off Elmevej onto Enebærvej and glanced down the street, what do I see but a great column of smoke rising from what looks like our property? I’m thinking, “The Enebærvej neighbors must be burning leaves or something.”

As I get closer it’s clear it’s our property, not theirs. Trine hadn’t said anything about burning leaves. By now I’m up to our property where it hits Enebærvej, where we have the little path through the shrubs to the back of the house. It’s where we have our garbage bin. And sure enough, I can see the garbage bin from the street, wild afire, flames licking two or three meters into the air. I take the corner slower than I want because I stand forewarned that the kids are running around the neighborhood. Once I round the corner onto Hybenvej without spotting any kids at play, I accelerate to our drive way, stop, throw open the car door, and, heedless of my still-healing stitches and considerable pain, I go galloping into the front door, holler “fire! Fire!” as I race through the house and out the kitchen door, then snatch the fire extinguisher from the boiler room on my way down to the conflagration.

Our garbage bin is just a big metal mesh bin with a metal lid and a thick paper bag that the garbage people take each week and replace with a new one. There’s a line on the inside of the big bag that you’re not supposed to fill beyond, or the garbage people won’t pick it up. (This has happened to us several times.) Garbage pickup is Wednesday morning, so this being Tuesday evening the bag had been nearly full.

I pull the pin and spray at the base of the flames, but the entire extinguisher is used up before the fire is completely out. Trine has appeared out of nowhere with yet another extinguisher: she aims and squeezes and it just goes, “pff” without producing anything. I rush back to the kitchen, fill a pitcher with water, rush back to the garbage bin and pour the water over the now gently burning pile of powder-covered garbage contained by the scorched metal bin. I repeat these three times before I decide I now have the luxury of enough time to get the hose uncoiled and hooked up to really douse the fire out of existence.

With the fire finally out to my satisfaction, I look around to see what I can learn.

“What did you throw out today?” I ask Trine.

“Just a few empty boxes of stuff and a bag of her diapers,” Trine says. “Nothing flammable… though with her diapers, you never know.”

Trine returns to Maddie, now crying on the terrace.

I notice two clues: the lid to the bin is open. We never, ever leave that lid open: it’d be like open invitation to all the creatures in the neighborhood, and besides, who wants the smell of baby diapers and kitchen waste wafting out from their property? Caught in some hedge roots across the walk from the bin is my second clue: a couple of a little pieces of reddish wrapping paper, singed at the edges. There are yellow labels on two of the larger bits. Firecrackers.

I also notice that our pile of seasoning wood beside the garbage bin had been singed and looks like it had been on the brink of igniting, if not partially ignited. That woodpile rests against the wooden gardening shed. And the lot of it is just a yard across from the corner of the house where Maddie’s bedroom is. I am like a wild animal with my rage. I tell Trine I know it must have been some boys in the neighborhood, and I’m going to go house to house to find them. She talks me out of this. We debate our options. But we’re still debating them when we here some firecrackers go off somewhere in the middle of our block.

We think it’s the family two houses down on Enebærvej, but we don’t really know them. I say I’m going to go over and accuse them. Trine calms me down. Molli Malou has learned of our fire by now and wants to show the neighborhood kids. I lead them over to the bin with Maddie in my arms and while they’re checking it out I come across our next-door neighbors from Enebærvej – a couple of guys sitting in front of the house.

“You guys hear any firecrackers?” I ask (this is all in Danish, which I only realize later).

“Hell yeah,” they answer. “The kids next door to us.” I was right!

“Did you not smell any smoke earlier?” I ask. They’re both smoking, so they look a little confused. “Come see,” I say. They follow me and look. They’re astonished. They had no idea.

I tell them not to feel bad… Trine had been in our backyard and hadn’t smelled or heard a thing.

I’m about to march over to the neighbors but Trine wisely chooses to do it herself. Not long afterwards the father, Jack, comes by with two very sheepish, very chastened boys. And a bottle of wine. He apologizes and says the boys will clean up and they’ll replace our fire extinguisher. He’s a nice guy.

A while later – we’ve sort of been grilling our dinner through all this, and it’s beginning to become a fire hazard in its own right – Jack and the boys come knocking again. They’re done cleaning; would I come look?

The whole area is spotless: no sign of fire or extinguisher powder remains.

“Well,” I say. “That’s very good. I liked fireworks too at your age, but you have to learn how to use them, don’t you? They’re fun, but they’re dangerous. Very dangerous. Aren’t we all lucky the fire didn’t get worse? Aren’t we all lucky no one got hurt? Very lucky indeed. But I’m glad you did the right thing. You took responsibility and you apologized and you cleaned up the mess and I appreciate that. You really did the right thing, and we can be happy neighbors again.”

It came out, unbidden, in perfect Danish. It was the damnedest thing: first to hear myself as the responsible adult chastising a couple of momentarily dumb but otherwise decent kids, secondly to hear it in Danish.

In any case, that’s the story.

* * *

As a progress report, however, Maddie is a rolling machine now, and does her back-to-front rolls more or less whenever she feels like it. She seems to enjoy lying on her tummy more than she used to: she spent nearly half an hour that way last night, which is by far the longest she’s ever lain like that happily. She’s also eating more and more solid food, and (as a result, we presume) she is getting much more regular about squeezing out those solid wastes.

Molli Malou is, by Trine’s reports, a little bored having her vacation at home, but is being very patient about it. It’s unfortunate that Sophie (two doors down) went off to Italy with her family Wednesday morning, and Mille and her family took off for some other points south a day later.

Maddie is making increasingly interesting sounds. We’re hearing more consonsants and little vowel aspirations… a lot of “byeah” and “dyuh” and “maa”. (Not “ma” or “mor” or “mad” yet, just an “mm” sound with an “a”-ish vowel trailing.) When she’s lying on her back and wants to be picked up, or suspects she’s about to be, she has a routine now: she establishes eye contact, smiles, jerks her little arms upward perpendicular to her torso, then alternately kicks her legs wildly and arches her back to the extent that only her heels and the back of her head are on the floor.

Her hair is growing in more by the day. She’s still mostly bald, but she’s getting a nice tuft of real blonde hair on the top of her head. At this rate she’ll have bangs before there’s anything on the back of her head… like a reverse mullet.

I am busy at work despite the fact that the country has more or less come to a standstill during summer vacation, and have a backlog of Io and other projects to work on, so the videos may be delayed even a little longer. But the prospect of a cool evening this weekend, with both girls asleep, spent cobbling together a few videos while I sip at mint juleps sounds very appealing.

To you Americans heading to Vegas, have a wonderful time! We wish we could be joining you for what will surely be a wonderful wedding and pseudo reunion in one my favorite towns in the world! Someone please find their way to a hot craps table and throw a few bucks on the hard eight… 44 is my lucky number this year! (Doesn’t seem that long ago that Trine and I were betting on the hard six at a table in Dubuque to make my lucky 33, sigh…)