Among my household chores were taking out the garbage and burning the trash. The garbage was table scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds, etc. Usually, it was wrapped in newspaper. Back then, everyone got at least one daily paper delivered to their doorstep. For several years, we got both the morning and evening papers, both the Minneapolis Star and the Tribune, as well as our village’s weekly , the Golden Valley Sun. People used to use yesterday’s newspapers for all sorts of things; many of the things we use paper towels for now. The rest would get stacked in a dry spot and tied with twine into bundles to be recycled at the elementary school’s paper sale. The ‘trash’ was all of the stuff that we threw away that would burn. Now some people had a different standard for that than we did, and would only burn paper, wood and cardboard. We liked to keep more out of the dump and have more fun. We burned our plastic, too. I know now that that probably wasn’t the best choice for the environment, or for my potential health. When one is nine or ten, one is not necessarily taking the long look. Plastic was fun to burn, because I could hang a molten piece on the end of a stick and watch the flaming plastic drip and hiss as it fell to the ground.
I enjoyed watching the fire. I would stay by it until it was safely done burning. My mom, B.J., wasn’t quite so attentive. There was a swamp behind our yard, then a steep hill with four rows of mature American Elm trees on it. The trees divided the hill into three sled paths in the winter. B.J. managed, on three different occasions, to let the trash fire get out of control and set the swamp on fire. Once, the fire was so bad, and the grass was so dry, that it burned all the way up the hill and part of the Moffat’s fence caught fire. When these fires occurred, all of the neighbors would get out their hoses and connect them to ours and Shermans’ in order to reach the swamp to contain the fire. One time, someone called the Golden Valley Fire Dept. They showed up in three cars, no tank truck, no hoses, no gear. They proceeded to tell us to hook our hoses together to put out the fire. We all told them to please go away! We had already done that. If they couldn’t offer any real help, just get out of the way!
We used a wire basket trash burner. The only image I could find of one for this post was from a vintage salvage company in the Midwest that finds antiques for movie sets. Ours had wider spaces between the wires. The top ‘flaps’ would not function after the first couple of weeks of use, being weakened by flame and corrosion.
When I think about it now, it was quite remarkable how frequently B.J. burned the swamp compared to how rarely she burned the trash. She did note how lush and vibrant all of the wildflowers and reeds came back after a fire.