Flashback: a Memory of Matches

From deep in the layers of the Not-A-Journal, I unearthed this bit of a memory about matches. So, you know, I’ve clearly been playing with matches for a long time. 

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Among my earliest memories is being in my grandmother’s house, mainly in the basement. Imagine the Brady Bunch house, and you’ll get a sense of the general style and open feel of my grandmother’s house at the time. With the big bar and the big fireplace. The fireplace was an intense affair, dominating one end of the basement den. I remember a Christmas tree. I remember sitting under the tree at one end of the fireplace hearth with one of my aunts. We were using silly putty or something to lift a newsprint image of Jiminy Cricket (I loved that cricket) and put it on a rock. The rock was eventually coated in clear nail polish and lived in one of my drawers. Jiminy gave me a smile and a whistle whenever I looked at it.

In the same place, but perhaps at a different time, I remember using a gadget that rolled old newspapers into fireplace logs. I always wanted to turn the crank on that log-roller. I’m not sure how well those newspaper logs burned, but they were no doubt lit by the incredibly, mind-bogglingly, long wooden fireplace matches kept in a box way up on the mantle where I could not reach them.

That part is a lie. The part where the matches were up high. That’s my mommy-eye remembering. *I* would keep the matches up high. But this memory lives in the 1970s, in a house with broad-open stairs and no baby gates. Grandma’s cigarettes and lighter were always sitting on some nearby table. So I don’t really know if the long matches were up out of my reach. Maybe I could reach them. Could feel their brittle length and their splinters. Smell the tips ready to ignite with the right friction. Knowing that those sticks could bring fire out of the air with its crackling golden light and heat.