04/20/2026
True Story: THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE…AND I’M ON THE SOFA!
By Linda Kay Baker
When I was about five years old, our house caught on fire.
At that time, we heated our home with a coal stove set right in the living room. It sat on one side of the room, and the sofa sat on the other—close enough that you could feel its warmth in the winter and sometimes smell the coal when it was freshly stoked. In those days, that was just life. Heat didn’t come from a thermostat; it came from fire, and fire always had a mind of its own if you weren’t careful.
My brother was in the first or second grade then, and on a cold morning before school, he decided the house needed more heat. Without my mother knowing, he packed the stove full of newspapers and then left for school.
It only takes a little extra fuel in the wrong place for fire to change from useful to dangerous. Paper, especially, doesn’t just burn slowly—it flashes. It catches quickly, sends heat upward fast, and can turn a contained fire into something that spreads before you even realize what’s happening. That’s exactly what it did. The flames climbed, and the heat worked its way into the wall behind the stove, where it began to catch.
House fires move faster than most people imagine. Smoke alone can become dangerous in minutes—thick, black, and hard to breathe. It rises first, which is why it can fill a room long before flames reach everything. In many home fires, it’s not the fire itself that causes the most harm at the start—it’s the smoke and the speed at which it takes over a space.
My mother sat me on the sofa and told me not to move until she came back. Then she ran next door to the school to get help.
When she reached the teacher and said her house was on fire, the teacher’s first question was, “Where is your little girl?”
That’s when it hit her—she had left me behind.
Panic set in immediately. In a house fire, every second matters. The difference between a small, contained fire and a fully involved one can be just a few minutes. My mother, the teacher, and several of the older boys from school ran back to our house as fast as they could.
I was still sitting on that sofa when they came through the door.
The boys grabbed a garden hose and managed to put the fire out before it spread further into the structure. In many cases like that, water alone can slow a fire down if it’s caught early enough—but once flames reach walls, ceilings, or hidden spaces, they can travel unseen and reappear somewhere else entirely.
I don’t remember being afraid. I mostly remember sitting there, waiting like I had been told, while something I couldn’t understand was happening all around me. The air was changing. The house was changing. And I didn’t yet know how quickly a home can turn into something unrecognizable.
That is one of the quiet truths about house fires: they don’t announce themselves politely. They don’t wait. They move through a house in ways that can surprise even adults who think they have time.
The lesson from that day has stayed with me all my life:
If your house is on fire, never, ever leave your young child inside while you go for help.
