Explosion at the wash pot on a wet morning.

Explosion at the wash pot on a wet morning. One of my tasks that I had to do weekly was to draw tubs of water for the weekly wash day and to start a fire under the kettle to heat the water for washing the clothes. This I had to do outside ever week rain, snow or sunshine. The hardest time was when it was raining because it is hard to start a fire out in the open when it is raining.

            One morning all the wood for the wash kettle I could find was wet. I brought coals from the wood stove in the living room and tried to get the wood to burn but I was not having any luck. We had run out of coal oil which to city people it is called kerosene. Kerosene is a liquid that is extracted from coal so country people called it what it is. It is coal oil. It is ideal to work with because it will burn when you put a match to it but it is not volatile.

            I was running out of time because I had to go to school but also had to get thing ready for my mother to do the weekly washing. Then I remembered something my father had told me one time. It must have been the devil that directed my father to tell me this thing because I had never ever considered it before. He said; “Son don’t ever try to start a fire using tractor fuel. It is dangerous.” Bingo! Gas will burn. I can get this fire started with a little bit of gas. I reasoned that I could but some gas in a small open container and stand back and pitch the gas on the coals which I had already placed under the wet wood. I failed to take into account that gas gives off fumes which linger in the air. So when I pitched my gas everything was fine until the hot coals ignited the gas and it exploded and followed the fumes back to me and singed my lashes and eye brows and the front part of my hair. Fire started, lesson learned and I never tried to use gas to start a fire again.