I felt bummed when my mom told me I had to go to the grocery store with her early that Saturday morning. It was around ten o’clock in the morning when she asked me, and we needed to go as soon as possible. My mom was making a meatloaf and she needed sides so she could finish making our lunch for later. When we left she said it wouldn’t harm anything if we left the food cooking in the oven, so she left it on.
When we left I kept thinking about the food. I could already taste the sautéed onion inside the meatloaf, and smell the sizzling of the warm aromas. Delicious I thought to myself as we pulled up in the grocery store parking lot. For an instance I got paranoid about burning the food but my mom said don’t worry about it. When we started walking around in the store my mind began to become hooked on the food again, like a fish on a hook or a monkey after a banana, but my mom took my mind off of it as she started talking away on her cell phone about who knows what. I thought to myself, shut-up it’s not that important whatever your talking about, but I thought about getting put on punishment so I kept my mouth closed.
We were on our way home now and I noticed a black fog in the sky. I thought the fog was just someone barbecuing but I learned otherwise later. We gradually got closer to my house, and we heard firefighter sirens rushing towards my neighborhood, and the black fog in the sky seemed to get darker. I could smell something burning when my mom rolled the window down a little, and we could see it was our house that was on fire. My mom seemed to panic as if she was on fire.
She hurried out of the car and ran to the fireman to see if everything was alright.
“Are my belongings damaged”, she asked the fireman.
“No it was just a minor fire which barely started, but seemed to started a huge fog for some reason,” he said.
“So what did it burn,” my mom asked.
“Just the walls and whatever was in the oven,” he said.
Another firefighter stepped in and said, “it was just a shortage in your oven, you should report this to your landlord and he’ll fix the damages.”
“Okay,” my mom said as she walked back to the car to give me the news.
She told me nothing was damaged except for the kitchen, and the landlord was going to fix the damages tomorrow. We spent a few nights at my grandparent’s house as the damages were being fixed. We later returned to our house that week, and never had any problems after that.
I remember how strong the smell of the smoke was. And I now realize you should never leave electronics running unattended. I use to act careless about leaving electronics running, but now I turn everything off when I leave the house, because I don’t want any accidents happening anytime soon. I also learned that be safe at one moment can save you the next.