Fire & Ice (Wilbraham, Massachusetts)

Fool that I was,  setting a fire (smart) with bare feet (not so smart) in the hand built brick fireplace located behind our once backwoods, now end of the suburbs, country cabin. . . .  I take great pride in being able to create fires that will cook perfect shish kebab -- can't do that with fires that the guys set (from huge logs) or with fires that my husband delights in putting together in five minutes (from all natural charcoal briquettes).  Have to do it myself starting with white birch bark (a trick that my nephew Jordan taught me), dry leaves, twigs, branches, limbs (all dry), feeding the limbs in as they burn.  Just like my Marashtzi mother-in-law taught me, just like the Guatemalan women in the countryside.  Sure saves on chopping wood.  After an hour of pushing the limbs into the fireplace as they burn, I usually have a great fire going, enough to cook shish kebab for 20.  But preparing a fire or cooking over a fire while barefoot may be playing the peasant, but not the clever peasant.   I learned my lesson the hard way when a burning coal fell unnoticed off of the front edge of the fireplace, and I stepped square onto it with my bare right foot.  (I don't know how those yogis survive!)  Now what . . . but, in fact, I knew just what to do.  Ice cubes.  And although my foot was burning badly, the ice cubes worked . .  I simply stepped on an ice cube (replacing it as it melted with another ice cube) for 8 hours.  I never did cook that shish kebab (luckily it was just for our family -- no guests that day).  Instead, I sat on our front porch, looking out at the Pioneer Valley, and placing one ice cube after another under my foot until the burning stopped.  And the burning did stop. Eight hours later.  Nary a scar. Thanks be to God.