I almost did not post this as it was not one of our better moments. But, if we only posted our better moments I think that’d leave the wrong impression. So, here we go.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. We went to church for 9 am, and afterwards I came home with the boys while Rachel stayed. She works for our church, and would be spending most of the day there. When we got home we noticed a strange odor as we piled out of the car. I checked the barn first thing, but all the animals were fine and the barn was clearly not the source of this unexplained scent. As I got towards the house I could identify what it was: smoke. And it wasn’t wood smoke, it was something burning that shouldn’t be.

I ran in, afraid that we had left something on the stove in our rush to get out on time. Nope, that wasn’t it. In fact, the kitchen smelled fine. A little like eggs and hash browns from breakfast, but fine. The dryer? No. The iron? No. I was puzzled, and was about to go back outside to source it when I decided to check upstairs. There’s nothing upstairs that could be causing smoke, but who knows?

I started choking the minute I got to the top step. The smoke was thick, and the fumes burned my eyes and throat to the point where I could not draw in a breath. After looking around, I could not see any reason for the smoke.

After herding the kids outside and calling 911, I went back upstairs to see if I could figure out what was going on (read: don’t do this. I was stupid.) The laundry appeared to have spontaneously combusted! There was no catalyst that I could see, the laundry was just burning up. I did not stay to investigate because I literally could not breathe while in the room. Asthma makes me sensitive to this kind of thing, but even without it this smoke was pungent.

The fire department arrived and located the problem: a lamp had been dropped and covered by the laundry, apparently by our youngest. It hadn’t been noticed that the lamp was on and burning before we left because this lamp was on a timer. While playing with the lamp he must have been fiddling with the timer and reset it to go off at a random time, which I guess would have been for while we were in church.

Fortunately the loss was minimal. A few articles of clothing (which, darn it all, included our wool socks and gloves!) the area rug that they were sitting on, and of course the lamp itself. Everyone is safe, and our home is undamaged aside from a small scorch mark on the hardwoods. That will be covered by a new area rug anyway, so I’m not sweating it.

So, we had Ash Wednesday in the literal sense. We had a talk about plugs, outlets and safety. It wasn’t long; they’re little and don’t have the attention span for that. Short and to the point is better at this age. Plus, I think having to have the fire department come said a lot on its own. They were already well shaken by the time we sat down to discuss it.

All this occured just as I had been thinking how I didn’t have anything interesting to post about since maple sugaring was ending. I will never again think that this is a bad thing.