“I’ll show you how I do it.”
I followed Dad out to the fire pit in the back yard. He pointed to a spot in the side of the pit where two bricks had space in between them.
“I get the blower and set it up so it’s pointing right through that hole there. Then it’s like an incinerator.”
“There’s a lighter on the desk in the garage.”
Then he and Mom got in the truck and went to church.
I got the blower off the toolbox, carried it over to the pit, set it on the ground, flipped the switch for the choke, and yanked on the cord … one, two, three, four times until it started up feebly at first and then strong.
I set the opening of the long neck so it pointed at the space between the bricks. The motor was making the base bounce around, so I got two rocks and set them on either side of the neck to hold it in place.
Ash was blowing out from the bottom of the pit. Two metal pales beside the pit were already full of ash from the leaves that Mom burned the day before. I took the two pales through the tree line and down to the pond to dump them in the water. This way they wouldn’t have a chance of causing a fire in the dry brush if I threw them over the fence behind the yard.
I brought the empty pales back, set them by the pit, and shoveled the ash from the pit into the pales. Then I took the bucket and scooped up leaves that were already on the tarp and dumped them in the pit.
The fire didn’t burn right away like I expected it to with the blower blowing and some hot embers still in the bottom of the pit from the fire the day before. I went into the garage to get some paper and the lighter off the desk. When I came back out, the fire was blazing two feet tall.
Then it was just a process of raking the leaves into piles, pulling the tarp next to the pile, raking the pile onto the tarp, pulling the tarp by the pit, and dumping bucketfuls from the tarp into the pit.
It was like an incinerator. Dad was right.