“Serving overseas as a small-town boy from America is intense, stressful and humorous! Enjoy a light-hearted story with me from our last 20 years overseas!”
—Matt
Kerosene and Mice
There is a country song that goes, “Seventeen, you don’t think that much about life, You’re just livin’, Like kerosene dancin’ around a fire, But you’re in it, So you jump right in, Ain’t afraid to fall, and you give it all”
One of my favorite things to do in grade school (before we became too busy with sports and school) was to go with a few friends to different wooded areas of farmers we knew around the county. We would bring hatchets, hammers, nails, string, BB guns, a cook stove and food. We would spend a Saturday building a treehouse fort in a tree, target shoot, and then cook a meal of Campbell’s Chunky Stew or Dinty Moore Stew right from the can.
On one Saturday, a friend’s dad asked if we would burn their brush pile at the far end of the yard and we could cook over it. For some reason, the dad was not around when we got to actually trying to light the wet brush. To speed up the lighting process we looked for what he had in his shed. We found a gas can, and none of us had enough sense of the danger that could pose. We poured the content of some of the gas can over the brush pile and it lit right up. The dad arrived later and saw the gas can sitting near us. He said that we were lucky that he had kerosene and no place to put it, so had put it into the empty gas can. He let us know that we would have possibly been crispy critters had it really been gas.
Years later, I was overseas and camping with a group along with two of my sons. The campground provided large stone barbecues and piles of firewood to use for free. I wanted my sons to get experience with fire building, so I let them each have a barbecue to build a fire in. We used both for cooking the large meal for the group. The stone barbecues were loosely constructed with no mortar to hold them together. As the stones heated up from the fire, mice began to come out of their home – the barbecues. Needless to say, the gals in the group had their feet lifted up on the picnic table bench during the meal.
Mice are much safer to be around at a campfire than gas or even kerosene, but it would have been hard to convince the gals of that at our campout.
Something similar ever happen to you? Contact me and let me hear your story!
mattsmishaps@gmail.com Matt’s Mishaps, PO BOX 114, Grabill, IN 46741
