The house on Scott Street was, for me, divided into two primary areas, the attic and the cellar. There were other rooms and spaces of which I have vivid recollections; however it was these which were primary. The cellar was a large dark and tangled affair of interconnected rooms each with it's own utilitarian purpose: coal room, furnace room, vegetable storage, darkroom/laboratory, etc. There were two larger central rooms, one for laundry, much of it done by hand as I remember in two concrete sinks. There was a chamber for the drying of clothes which consisted of a metal lined closet six feet high, four feet wide and eight feet deep with three steel doors that pulled out on rollers, each having a series of racks over which the clothes were draped. Along the floor of this chamber ran a length of gas pipe forming a burner seven feet in length. It was this device which enriched my experience with danger and with fire, having on several occasions demonstrated for my friends by igniting the gas to see it explode. How that cabinet resisted that flame or how I was unharmed by that boiling flash I am unsure.

There was also a small laboratory and dark room that my Grandfather had used for photography that was complete with gas jets and Bunsen burners, stocks of chemicals in brown bottles with rust colored labels pealing and disintegrating, all still lining the shelves of the room. I felt a sense of wonder on first entering this space and that wonder grew with each new discovery. My brother and I printed the glass photographic negatives we discovered by placing them on paper my grandfather had sensitized and set them in the sun to watch the images appear and then disappear into the blackness of the small squares as the light eroded those images.

Certainly one of my most profound experiences with fire took place in that room and is, in some respects, more vivid today than ever it was. It is the image of a room filled with flame, flame clinging to the walls, ceiling and moving swiftly across the floor while I watch in shocked surprise and terror. It is my mind racing in that moment of suspended animation, desperate for a solution and knowing full well that I am powerless to either stop it or to extinguish it. It is the moment I poured water onto that pot of flaming paraffin. As the wax erupts and in an instant flame is everywhere I can see. Why it is not clinging to me I do not know although I am in the center of the room and flame has beaten me to the closed door. Then, just as it had erupted it is gone and the flame vanishes. I stand in stunned silence and do not know what has happened. All I am aware of is that the fire is gone.

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