Aunt Afton

My dad’s sister was named Afton. My younger sister and I stayed with Aunt Afton, in Casper, Wyoming, for a few days once. We were about 9 to 12 years old. We had to stay in the house. Aunt Afton was a young grandmother age lady. She had a nice clean house, with thick carpet and tasteful decorations. No toys, just what we brought with us. It was luxurious but boring. We entertained ourselves for a lot of the time, reading, playing, talking, imagining. She had a clock that chimed every fifteen minutes. We pretended to worship in front of it. We crawled around behind the couch and under an enormous macrame planter that held a huge round sheet of glass; a large plant pot sat on the glass. We had a cigarette lighter with us; I don’t remember which of us flicked it on underneath the fluffy end of the macrame. It immediately started to burn. I don’t remember how we got out from under it behind the couch. I just remember a switch went on in my head; I promptly and mechanically went to the kitchen, got a container, filled it with water, dumped it on the fire, repeated two or three times. I was still in the house when a fireman came in and saw the fire was under control. He made us all go outside. They set up huge fans at the entrances of the house to remove the smoke. There was a large black swoosh on the wall where the water had hit while the wall was hot. Thankfully nothing else caught fire. The glass fell and put out the fire under it; the couch was safe. The synthetic carpet did not catch fire. My mother, after hugging us, told us sternly that we had cost our aunt a lot of money in repairs. I felt very ashamed. We must have been protected by God; that could have gone so far sideways!