She’d have been pretty comfortable this winter. It has not been especially evident in California, especially here in the South. Last winter – whoo hoo, we had frozen grass and mad storms even down here in Los Angeles! This year, not so much. In fact, it’s been getting slowly, steadily warmer all through January and February, as if winter is slinking away without anyone noticing it.

It was nearly 90 degrees today, and is still well over 70 as I write. The porch door is open, the Corgi trotting importantly in and out and making his nest in the shadow of the new wisteria leaves. The roses are all putting out new red growth, little flames on the canes I haven’t had the time to prune yet – I’m gonna be snipping frantically to avoid the growth nodes, which shouldn’t have happened for another month. Forgotten bulbs are putting up cautious little spear tips here and there.

Mind you, this happens in Southern California from time to time. I can recall many years when winter was a mild, halcyon season; everyone rejoiced then, with no fear of the onset of global warming. But a warm California winter isn’t a sign of global warming per se; seasonal fluctuations are not global trends. All this really means is we won’t have snow in the mountains, or enough water this summer.

Of course, March may yet drown us. That happens every few years, too – they always call it the March Miracle, and the newscaster weathermen have wild, grateful dance ceremonies where they sacrifice almanacs and interns. But it’s just that they don’t remember past years – it happens like this a lot. California has weird, custom weather, and the fact that we’ve all had to find our huaraches this month doesn’t mean we won’t be back in the mud boots come March.

I remember lots of years where Mamma draped us in drop clothes to get to church on Easter, lest the rain dissolve the starch that kept our outfits – from tiny veiled straw bonnets to little lacy socks – unnaturally crisp. Kage wore green, I wore blue, Anne wore pink, Kimberly wore yellow. We each had our colours and we were all 50% rayon and 50% Niagara Starch. Starched lace socks and petticoats and panties are a veritable purgatory through an Easter Mass, but not as dreadful as the sticky, clinging mess they dissolve into it rained upon …

So, anyway, it may yet rain like crazy. But not today. Today, it’s a balmy Paradise here. Birds are singing, including one lone and exquisite mocking bird that sweetens my nights of late. The camphor trees are thick with tiny white blossoms, and the warm days make all the street smell of incense and citrus from them. The hills are greening. Mock orange and real orange and lemon and tangerine and grapefruit are blossoming, creating banks of perfume like ocean fogs, with a scent you can drown in from sheer bliss.

I hope the rains come, I do – we need them. But one cannot ignore the glory of this early spring, either, or this confused winter, or whatever it is. The weather is marvelous. Kage would be rejoicing and out in the garden like the Entwife she was at heart, encouraging order and new life from the wildness in the flower beds. I’ve at least opened the doors and windows so the scents come inside to spend the day with me, and I can watch the late light on the new grass.

I figure, take it while we can. In a week it might be winter again.

This is why they’re going nuts in New Orleans today and tonight (though the majority of the bare-breasted, beer-swilling, bead-lusting crowd don’t remember the cause). It’s why the vestment colours in traditional RC churches change to penitent purple. It’s why generations of Christians ate pancakes on this day – because those succulent cakes of white flour, sugar, milk and eggs are composed entire of mortal sins. Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Mardi Gras – it’s pancakes, all the way down.

Mamma always made pancakes for breakfast on this day. They tasted better, knowing that we wouldn’t see them again for at least 6 weeks. Sometimes she made them for dinner, too; with the addition of meat – which would also be in short supply through Lent – it was a feast. I guarantee we realized the difference between Lent and the rest of the year, though probably not with the pious enthusiasm the nuns hoped for …

When Kage and I were kids, Lent was a serious affair. We went to Mass before school started at least 3 days a week – having fasted since midnight the night before. Mamma met us outside the church in the precious 20 minutes between Mass ending and class starting, some brief breakfast – muffins (butter, but no jam), or plain doughnuts, or grits; hot cocoa or black coffee in a thermos. A few fast gulps and swallows and we were charged for the morning. It always reminded me of the scene in Nicholas Nickleby where the boys make a hasty breakfast before being shipped off to Dotheboys Hall.

Nowadays, no one fasts at all, I think. It’s none of my business anymore, of course – Christianity didn’t take with me, and I long ago ceased identifying myself as one. But I was raised that way, and I do remember clearly the sense of pageantry and importance the old rituals imparted. How special can pancakes taste now, when there is no Lenten fast lurking on the other side of that sweet horizon?

Anyway, Kage and I always ate pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. And then not again until after Easter, just … because. Because it was the way it was done. And Kimberly and I made ‘em tonight, too, with the extra indulgence of bacon on the side.

It was fantastic.

Give-away symptoms include spending the day in your jammies or sweat clothes;  a decreased blink rate and a glassy gaze; general blurred fecklessness; and leaning at an acute angle in your seat. One is usually rather cross, but too vague to actually quarrel or bitch. It’s a regression to a basal fungoid state.

We learned later in life that “mumping” is also Brit slang for begging or mildly official graft – doughnuts or the odd pint for the local constable; the co-worker who hangs around your desk and eats all the best stuff in your candy dish. Kage’s kind of mumping wasn’t that active, and didn’t ever actually get you anything. It just absorbed all your energy and turned you into a sort of low-level fog bank …

When we were young, she’d announce gloomily: “I’m mumping. I am now a mump sprout. Nothing will be done today.”

When we reached middle age, she decided she was no longer a sprout of anything. She matured into a mump blossom. She favoured shawls and lap robes, then; rum and Coke in tea cups, and plates of nicely buttered toast. They were consumed without any apparent enthusiasm – enthusiasm has no place in professional mumping – but kept her alive to eventually recover from the malady.

After watching enough television, she’d get incensed at the limp plots and idiotic dialogue, and be driven back to writing in a frenzy. So mumping in front of the telly eventually led back to something useful. Unless she found vintage cartoons or classic film noir, or some of those insane Mexican soap operas. Kage could watch any of those for hours.

I’ve been veering into a state of mumpishness for a couple of days now. I think I’d have  dissolved completely if not for accidental life savers thrown into my stagnant pool by the local world. What passes for reality around here has been throwing pebbles at my window, trying to get my attention.

I got a new volume of the intermittent Vogue Stitching Dictionary – this one on knitted trims. It’s gorgeous; the mere sight of all the cunning little edgings makes ones hands itch pleasantly. For unknown (but doubtless stylish) reasons, the editors of Vogue have released each one with photos in a specific colour range. This one is in purples. It’s sumptuous.

The new flock of parrots that has swept into our neighborhood decided to settle down for a late afternoon snack in the camphor tree on our front lawn! I was finally able to see the little buggers up close – a fine big flock of Red-Crowned Amazons. They’re sometimes called Mexican Red-heads, and are hilarious to watch in the trees. Noisy and messy, but I do dearly love Amazon parrots; I’m glad they’ve decided to live here.

I have red Jello, and Belgian chocolate pudding. I have my Kindle. A good friend is making noises about maybe collaborating a story (neat!) and I’m selecting a Kage story to go in another anthology. I’m getting in a blog entry.

So while I may be a mump blossom today, I think I’m going successfully to seed. It’s the best fate for a mump blossom. My petals will decorate the grass, and a passing parrot can snip off my stem and whittle into a whistle for the spring wind to blow through; I can hang in the trees like an abandoned trumpet, and be the voice of dreams.

For her, that meant writing; but it applies to anything. There are days when one can neither get any ideas across to other people, or understand what they are saying. I am infamous for this, for the days when I wander around saying “What?” to every remark. In fact, the kids in my theatre group say it isn’t really a Fair until I start doing this …

But from my side, it’s a drag. My eyes are ringing and my ears are blurred.

Days like this, everyone you call is out. Incoming calls seem to be all from telemarketers speaking Basque. Nothing you go shopping for is in stock; or, in fact, presently even exists. Your favourite radio station is having a polka festival or a fund drive, and your cable TV has reformulated its lineup so that BBC America has been replaced with BassMaster. You don’t know what you want to eat, but it’s certainly none of the bizarre and unlikely foodstuffs that are somehow inhabiting your pantry … when on earth did you buy lichees in orange syrup, and why? They look like larvae in Dayquil sauce.

The world is a horrible mystery, and you are staggering through it in a state of intellectual deshabille, looking for your underwear.

I woke up at 11 this morning, and managed to stay awake until just past the meridian. I’ve been asleep most of the time since then, coming to the surface dimly from time to time. I manage to stay awake just long enough to realize, in horror, that I have once gain been felled by the narcolepsies.Then, glub, I’m gone.

Suspecting I will soon feel the black syrup of sleep slipping over me once more, I am sitting here scribbling a hasty message to the world. I’m here! I’m alive! I am going to stay awake for awhile, come hell or high water, in the hopes of sleeping the night through – that may kick my system back into something normal. You know: awake by daylight, and long enough to accomplish something? It would be nice.

Also, when you live in a holiday town – as we did for years – three day weekends always assume the aspect of a broad-spectrum festival. The ordinary weekend tourists are thicker, more crazed, dazed and amazed. Merchants stay open later, the sidewalks are crowded, the beach is a festive field of holes and sand castles. People walk around with ice cream cones. There are banners, and the bars leave their doors open so music spills out; and people are lined up at the takeout windows, visibly jonesing for barbecue and clam strips and kebobs and chow mien and cheese pizza slices.

In good years, we usually had a nice assortment of friends and family camped out in the back yard. The Fourth of July was most crowded, but Presidents Day usually drew a nice lot of refugees, too. Our tiny cottage was crammed with loved ones, and it was bliss.

Even when no one came to visit, Kage was in bliss – writer’s bliss, where the time meant nothing and the hours flew away as she fell through the magic portal of her monitor screen into the worlds inside her head. When that happened, the characters tended to come out and relax in our living room; Kage’s invention would spread like the tide running up the beach and the story would fill our house. Prose became performance and the narrative got tangled up in our daily life; meals were based on what Lord Ermenwyr liked, or Mendoza’s favourite torta recipe, or things Kage invented to be representative of the cuisines of the yendri or the Children of the Sun …

I swear I have shared home-made egg rolls with Dread Gard – though Kage left out the caustic oils that the Sun-born favoured. I’ve shared sardines in severely deformed tortillas (in the absence of a tortilla press, Kage put my vintage Grey’s Anatomy on top of them and jumped up and down)  with Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax. All Kage’s worlds were plotted out over meals, around fires, while ferrying pancakes from the stove stop to the plate; the eccentric physiologies of The Magnificent Variable Erdway and the Company Operatives were plotted at picnic tables in a dozen turn-offs above Highway 1.

While eating Funyums and drinking Mr. Pibb.

The diet and the rigours of this kind of adventure would likely kill me at the moment. Still … I think I’ll pack a couple of out-of-season Chilean lemon plums and a nice bottle of filtered water, and drive up into Griffith Park. Maybe round some curve under the sea-foam walls of the Observatory I’ll come up on a red-haired girl walking hand in hand with a Very Tall Person.

It’s worth a try. It’s a three-day weekend.

Kittens just passed muster – she could always see the cat under the skin, she said. She was fonder of foals and ducklings, for their artistic merit; and puppies, because they usually grew up to be useful citizens. Most of her limited cute tolerance was reserved for human babies.

Raccoons didn’t make her list.

I’m a lot more tolerant than Kage was: and I HATE RACCOONS! There. I said it. Screw you, Mikko and all those extras in Bambi and Snow White. They are malign, vicious demons, out to destroy our way of life and our vermin-proof garbage cans. Nature has equipped them with all sorts of traits that should add up to cuteness, but just don’t.

Merely having big eyes and hands is not enough. Neither is being fuzzy. Fuzz is not, in and of itself, attractive; recall the last time you had to clean out a lint trap. Big eyes, ditto – I invite you to contemplate the Humboldt squid, who will happily gaze into your eyes with its goggling own as it eats your face. And hands might even be a sign of inherent evil.

Not fat starfish baby hands, all dimpled and soft. Those are charming. But raccoon hands are  skeletal and twitchy; they look like black gloves. They explore hinges and locks and handles with a ceaseless destructive energy, constantly testing for the critical weakness – even when they sit up (am enchanting posture in an otter or a Corgi) those nasty little  hands hang there at belly level, ready to lash out and grab you … they’re not washing their food, you know. They’re drowning it.

And they make noises like microphone feedback.

And they run around at night but apparently have poor night vision, which is a hell of a way to be nocturnal. It means they run into walls and trees and one another, and fall off roofs, and all the while they are squealing like a cheap audio setup in the high school gym. When they run into cars – and they do – the car alarms go off and then you get raccoon feedback and whatever hysterical noises have been programmed into your pretentious neighbor’s BMW.

And then the dogs bark. All. Night. Long.

Someone up the block keeps beagles. Even on a good day, beagles sound like they’re being murdered; three or four hours into a raccoon-fest night, they sound like they’ve been killed, reanimated and are now being roasted undead. Someone else up the block keeps chihuahuas, who shriek like human children. And we have a Corgi: a brave, determined, Corgi with OCD, who will bay and howl at raccoons for as long as it takes to drive them away. Even if it takes 4 hours. Even if the sky is getting light and his mistress is sobbing on the couch before the raccoons get far enough away to satisfy him. Even if you bribe him with marshmallows and cheese; which really ought to be enough for anyone …

I am sure you have detected my gist by now. We had raccoons all night, which is like having malaria – every time you start to relax, it comes back.

Of all the animals unjustly regarded as cute, racoons are prime. Just because they have fur and comic haberdashery, they have an undeserved reputation for being adorable; when in fact they are Lords of Lesser Evil and minions of the Greater. Somewhere, I am sure, hideous chthonic hybrid raccoons lurk in the dark, washing their horrid little hands with tentacles, sending out waves of their brethren to dance obscenely and clumsily on my roof.

Try going to the bathroom at 5 AM, and having a raccoon plummet past the window while you sit there exhausted in the dark. It kicked and clutched at the window, too, as it went squealing past; and the house shook, I swear, when it hit the ground … good thing I was sitting where I was.

Fuzziness is not enough to make them tolerable. Because, because, you know because why? Under the black masks and stripes and fuzz, there is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montauk_Monster

That’s right. You’ve all been warned. Do not be fooled by fuzz. Now I’m gonna go make a jelly bread sarnie and load the big squirt gun, and take a wary nap. ‘Cause I know they’re out there.

Of course, I never did listen, so it’s not too surprising that I haven’t been remembering her good advice recently. It certainly wouldn’t surprise her. She always felt slightly annoyed about it, and maintained that no one listened to her anyway.

That wasn’t true, of course. By the end of her life, thousands of people had listened to her and were clamouring for more. I cannot tell you, Dear Readers, how happy that made her. Kage had a soft voice, a diffident manner, a bad case of the shyness, and came from – and then went into – enormous families: she was accustomed to being outshouted. But no one can outshout the written word. She exulted in that.

But she still got overlooked in public conversations. It really narked her, too. At first, at science fiction conventions, she was overshadowed on panels – by the loud, the obnoxious, the self-involved; sometimes by the truly famous – though not those last as much, because the real pros tend to be gracious. And tired. They’re glad to share the spotlight … but the people who have self-published a cartoon guide to Ewok footprints, or a parody of Harry Potter: they plough right over a quiet person like Kage.

She learned, though. Some of it was body English – an incredulous stare, a raised eyebrow, a roll of her black eyes could pull the audience back to her end of the table. And when she had the microphone, she was a ruthless moderator. When someone strayed too far off the topic – especially into self-aggrandisement, the usual detour – she would announce, “Annnd, that’s enough of that, as Sister Julian used to say – back to the subject at hand.”

Once an over-enthusiastic fellow panelist on a talk about the rigours of research abruptly announced that the topic was boring – they would now highjack the panel and talk about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kage leaned over the microphone and said clearly, “Or not“, quelled the rebellion with a long stare, and promptly returned the panel to the necessity of not using historical romances as primary documentation. The audiance applauded.

It was relatively easy to talk over her in a social setting. But with the staff of Authority – or a mike – in her hand, Kage was an implacable Athena Ergane.

Since I got ambulatory once more, I tend to run about and exhaust myself; then I get glassy-eyed and sleep for 4 hours. Most of last week, I was awake all night and asleep most of the day, alternately running around madly and falling over in a coma. It’s been like that since I began to feel better. It must be like living with a large hamster.

Basically, I have somewhat over-reached  myself lately. I need to listen to Kage more in my head – because for once she isn’t saying “Write, you slacker!” – she’s telling me to recover before I start racing off in all directions. And it’s not fair to Kimberly, who has nursed me so far, to be so careless of my returning vigour:  it’s not that Kimberly is neglecting to rein me in, but the poor girl has a husband and a son and a job to see to. When she’s off doing something important, I get loose and do too much. And the wrong things. At the wrong time.

Which leads then leads to my running out of energy before I thought I would, and thus to my neglecting the things I really wanted to do; and could, in fact, have accomplished if I hadn’t decided that just because I can drive a little means I can run off and go shopping for garden statuary. Hence my erratic attendance to this blog. I keep waking up and discovering I’ve been asleep for half the day.

So I’m gonna listen more to Kage. I shall endeavour to cut back on the off-road adventuring for a while, and concentrate on doing my sit-down chores like a sensible person. You need lots of energy to be an idiot, I am finding. I will take Kage’s advice and use what I have to make something besides tracks in a circle.

Children were different. But among the many arguments over child development is the theory that we all learn how to be human. Children are something else, still experimenting with the idea of growing up to be otters or trees or robots or squirrels. Kage was more comfortable among people who were not yet decided on what human means, and most of those are little kids.

Most of the rest are individuals engrossed in the arts. She got on pretty well with quite large crowds of actors or artists, most of whom were paying no more specific attention to her than she was to them. That was a group dynamic through which Kage could move with ease and comfort. Book conventions – which she had initially dreaded – were thus much more natural environments for her than she originally feared. All those people were making something – art, new worlds, social constructs – and not just circling round in cocktail party predation.

Kage could watch, relatively unobserved, and join where she felt safe. And that was what she most enjoyed – watching from the comfort of a hunter’s blind; sliding through the crowds in her own ghillie suit, a social Tarnhelm. I think one of the reasons her observations of the human condition were so sharp and accurate is that she made them while safely, objectively, effectively invisible.

A friend recently posted a definition of writing that was Kage Baker exactly:

Writing: an occupation for introverts who want to tell you a story, but don’t want to make eye contact while doing it.

Kage adored telling stories.She never outgrew the childhood desire to be the very first to break exciting news; I remember her even getting a kick out of telling people she had cancer. She hid it for months – but when she went public, she ordered me anxiously, “Now, let me tell it my way!” And she wasn’t sparing anyone’s feelings. She was calculating effects.

In childhood, Kage made up stories for other kids to base games on. More often she scripted her own play, inventing entire worlds and personae to enact through the faeryland of the family gardens. One of them was a squirrel – when Kage was tiny, the squirrel made tea sets out of eucalyptus nuts and leaves, and hid stashes of goodies all over the yard. As Kage got older, the squirrel adventures  grew ever more exciting and detailed; Amazonian bows made from saplings, secret code messages in invisible ink hidden in the stones of Momma’s dry-stone walls, secret doors reached by rappelling off the roof. When we were in our teens and 20′s, Missy Squirrel tended to suddenly appear sometime after midnight, a cocktail in paw. Many were her escapades in the Hollywood Hills, accompanied by her faithful sidekick, a Mouse.

Firesides were among her favourite places to tell stories. Even symbolic fires: any light in the darkness was a fireside, and she told most of her tales there. Dashboard lights on late night highways; campfires in woods by the sea, waving a marshmallow on a stick like a wand. By lantern light under oak boughs. Anywhere that eyes gleamed fascinated and blind out of the safe, transforming dark – Kage told stories. Some of you, Dear Readers, heard her then; all of you have heard the results, when she polished up the tales she made to accompany beer and S’Mores, and wrote them down.

You can tell stories so much more easily from behind a mask. The squirrel saga was private and silly; and, yes, alcohol was usually involved. Kage’s other masks, though – satin and leather and beaten gold, engraved and embroidered and gemmed with magic jewels; with eye wide and filled with mirrors and flames, so that you’d think no one could ever see out of them. But Kage did. And didn’t have to make eye contact with anyone but the gods.

I have healed like a superhero from my surgery; the incision is completely closed, and judging from the paucity of twinges from the inside, that’s healing well too. The rest of the family had a horrendous cold sweep through – even the cats were sneezing – which I shrugged off with ease. But third time pays for all, as the old saying goes, and I have fallen prey to a plain fit of gastritis.

My stomach hurts, I’m feverish, and I’m fighting off D-Day waves of recurring nausea and heartburn. I want to be up and doing nifty useful and creative things, but once I achieve a vertical position all I can do is concentrate on is not throwing up. Life is yucky today.

It’s amazing how relatively brave and determined one can be in the face of big, scary ailments, only to revert to a peevish 5-year old when afflicted with a tummy-ache. I want Kage to read to me. I want ginger ale with a bendy straw. I want the special old cut-work and embroidered pillow cases Mamma used to give us (once she was sure we wouldn’t throw up on them) to aid our recoveries. I want a giant box of crayons, a fresh pad of construction paper and an empty Quaker Oatmeal box to turn into a cylindrical castle or space ship … I want fudgesickles and apple sauce and butterscotch pudding.

To tell you the truth, though, I’m not sure these old talismans have retained their magic, here on the edge of my sixth decade. They all worked well enough when I trotted them out desperately for Kage – but Kage was not fixed in time like most people, and possessed  the magical ability to imbue her surroundings with the ambiance of vanished times. In my case, the bendy straw would promptly suck flat, the pudding would be sugar-free, and the crayons would be lacking all the old, old colours in favour of modern crap like Banana Mania, Fuzzy Wuzzy and Screamin’ Green.

So I’m going to go to sleep. Sleeping through this will be nearly as good as not having it at all. Maybe I’ll dream about Kage, and the days when illness could be ameliorated by crisp sheets and a brand new crayon sharpener.

That would be nice.

Which is pretty much gall from the person who was usually at my side when I did it … while it’s quite true I seem to have a knack for weird accidents, Kage was usually right beside me when I fell off a roof, or was run over by a startled deer, or developed a weird disease.

I don’t know why I attract such domestic drama. I keep expecting to reach those golden days when nothing peculiar happens anymore – but I am aging like Calamity Jane, and it appears there are no peaceful back waters for me. If I find one, it will turn out to be a breeding ground for mutant skunks with hands. Or something.

Our house has a fireplace. I like a small fire on cold evenings. We usually use artificial logs to at least start the fire, as they are a nice example of recycling – made of sawdust and paraffin instead of some noble oak that was cut down by a mall developer. Night before last, though, the damned thing wouldn’t stay lit. This is about impossible for something made of sawdust and paraffin; or so we thought. But when it insisted on going out repeatedly, we gave up; it was laying there dark and unburning when I went to bed.

Unknown to us, though, the cunning log continued to smoulder through the night. The smell of smoke was pronounced – at which point, we figured it out and closed the glass fireguard doors to keep it contained – there was still no visible  smoke or flame, but sparks are always possible. We thought we were being clever, see.

But the log was cleverer than us. When Kimberly left to pick up her husband, Ray, for a doctor’s appointment, thick white smoke was pouring out of the chimney. Her last frenzied instruction to me, flung over her shoulder, was: “Call the fire department, we might have a chimney fire!”

Panic stations! I called 911, poor nephew Michael attempted to leash the Corgi (who had no idea why we were running around, but was prepared to panic out of sheer camaraderie), and the cats just sat and blinked. Not even Harry, a semi-professional hysteric, seemed upset by anything but us. However, when the firemen arrived – 6 trucks! Dozens of large men with axes and ladders! – all bets were off and all the animals freaked. The cats vanished, Harry started bugling like a dragon, and the dog went into a frenzy.

You have to picture me, in my tatty convalescent sweat clothes, surrounded by huge men with axes and Trojan helmets, rushing around the house. Mike was dealing with the Corgi, who had settled on trying to herd the firemen as a logical response, and answer the phone – which was poor terrified Kimberly, still trying to collect Ray and simultaneously find out if her house and family were on fire. The phone kept going out, convincing her Mike was hanging up on her for unknown reasons; and Mike, in a 20-year old attack of bravado, started yelling at the firemen. Not surprisingly, they yelled back.

Acoustic scientists say that a female voice cuts through ambient noise better than a male one. I have found this theory proven many times upon occasions of riot and confusion, and so it proved yestreday. Or maybe men are just naturally intimidated by loud old women … Despite being shoulder-high to everyone else involved, I was able to make myself heard over the masculine shouting, send Mike and the dog away, get the attention of the lead fireman, and point out that the smoke was, indeed, diminishing as they poured water on the log. Calm descended and rationality resumed.

This would all have been figured out eventually by the firemen (who are, after all, pros at this) but I’d like to think that my leaping up and down screaming had some salutary effect. At the very least, the sight of a middle-aged soprano troll doll having a fit in front of them slowed the heroic firemen down long enough to prevent them from axing holes in the ceiling.

Once everyone was quiet, it was easy to determine what had happened. The log had indeed caught – but all it did was smoulder. No visible flames, no smoke at room level – it had all risen and accumulated at the wire mesh spark guard on top of the chimney. It finally exited in a thick white mass: thus giving the impression that the accumulated soot inside the chimney had caught fire. Ta-da!

Oh was the general reaction. It must have just been … a smouldering log.

The water mess was happily confined to the fireplace itself. The walls were left un-axed. The neighbors were reassured. The firemen and the nephew did not come to territorial blows. The fire captain assured me that it was better to err on the side of caution, and they were glad not to have found a real fire. I thanked them all and sent them on their way with grateful waves; we opened all the doors and windows to let out the smoke smell, and sat around shaking for the rest of the afternoon.

Ray still has no idea it happened at all. But I have this feeling Kage does, and somewhere is stifling a snicker and saying, “Only you, kiddo.”

But, you know? It’s kind of comforting.