childhood story #1

since i am waiting for an autocad license to open, i figure i will write a little bit until then.

my father has this strange passion for making these insanely huge fires in the fireplace of our little brick house. as long as i can remember, he would constantly pack the thing with any burning material he could find. despite anything we would say about his packrat tactics of going full throttle with things you probably shouldn't burn (christmas wrapping paper, magazines that had "not passed the test," things that my mom or us girls had written for school and wanted to discard as void from our lives), the man was obsessive with having control over the fireplace. that was his domain. it still is his domain.
i was ten years old. christmas had brought many fascinating trinkets of things that i most likely either took apart or destroyed as part of my childhood fascination. my father was in the living room, going nuts with the fireplace. my sister and i were listening to dr. dre and trying to act like we were black. that's when we heard footsteps on the roof.
"is santa back?"
jill stares at me stupidly. "you know santa doesn't exist."
"then what the hell is that?"
"...is dad on the roof?"
we try to put the sound, the time placement, and the fact that we still were not black together. my sister commented that the house smelled like smoke and that she thought our house might be on fire. i couldn't tell, since i have hardly any taste or smell, and so i jill and i argued over this for sometime. we get into the living room to see the fireplace smoking like crazy, flames coming out the sides. we run outside and see our father throwing snow down the chimney.
"girls! girls!!! get your super soakers filled with water and start hitting the fireplace!"
for some reason, despite the fact that it had been my dream to shoot my super soaker in the house, the whole idea of it had lost a lot of its glory that day. here we are, in the middle of our glory years of adolescence, trying to save our house from being engulfed in flames. with the double barrel action of water that my gun provided, as well as jill's, we were able to control the flames from the front. my dad controlled it through the chimney itself, and our house was saved.
...except for the fact that we had this large puddle of disgusting chimney water all over the floor in the family room. we all vowed to be quiet about the event, and we all went to work on cleaning the floor. dr. dre sang about his ladies and bling, and we all wondered why we weren't black.