Well, one of the stories that I had pretty much forgotten about was when my youngest sister was born. We had had a new house built over the summer. She was born in the fall. And so, when she was born, the doctor requested that she stay in the hospital — my mom stay in the hospital a couple of extra days, so that we could get moved into the new house. First off, can you even imagine that being requested today? You know, they don’t, they don’t keep new mothers in the house — or, in the hospital at all, let alone a couple of extra days, just because we asked for it.
So, yes, my mama and my youngest sister stayed in the hospital a couple of extra days. Several relatives and a couple of neighbors came over and helped us move in. And — in fact, the guys, the painter, the painters were still downstairs painting when we move — when we were moving in and one of my aunts heard, one of the painters say to the other one, “They’re moving in upstairs,” and sure enough we were, so it’s like “You guys better hurry up and get done painting.”
Okay, so my dad, me, my siblings, we were in the new house that first night, and we had a fireplace.Well, we never had a fireplace before and we had all these scraps of wood around, you know, from building the house. And so we all thought it would be a good idea to gather up some of these scraps and start a fire, see how this works. Okay, so we did. One of the problems was that they weren’t just, you know, scraps of two by four, they were also scraps of plywood and so on. So they had other stuff in them other than just wood, they had chemicals and glues and stuff. So, anyway, we gathered them up, we stacked — stacked a stack in the fireplace and lit it on fire.
All of a sudden, smoke starts rolling out of the fireplace. And my dad rushed in and he’s like, “You gotta open the flue.” Well, we didn’t know anything about a flue, we’d never had a fireplace before. So my dad reached in and opened the flue and then it was all good, but the house was already full of this terrible smelling smoke because of all the pieces of plywood and so on that were in there. So, yeah, big cloud of smoke, brand new house, gonna bring a brand new baby home in a couple of days. Yeah, it was great. So, we went around, we opened all the windows, all the doors so the house could air out.