The fire was bright and welcoming, but before long I noticed that it was getting bigger at the bottom and even spreading on the floor. Eventually the thought hit my mind, the floor of the tree house was made of wood. Well I told you I was a curious child but I didn't say that I was bright one as well.
I quickly jumped for the door and flew through the air all the way down to the white crusted ground, hardened from a full day of melting. When I landed, I did so with such force that my arm immediately snapped and screamed at me in pain.
I looked down at my arm to see blood smearing across the milky surface of the white ground where I had landed. Cradling my arm close to me I looked up to see most of the floor of my beautiful little tree house come crashing down all around me.
I cried out for Gamma, then in a flash I realized that she would never come when I called for her again, would never make me cookies again, never read me stories. My beautiful Gamma was gone, forever, and I fell mercifully unconscious before the first ember touched the ground and the entire tree became alit in a blaze of fury above my little body.
In only one single day my whole world and my love of cookies had changed forever.
The broken bone in my arm healed easily, and I still have the scars from the fire that this young boy, just turned six, had set with kitchen matches. With a single unknowing action I had completely destroyed my entire playground.
To this day I have no idea how I escaped that fire. They found me on one of the lawn chairs wrapped in a blanket from my bed. I must have crawled to safety in my feverish delirium but I honestly do not remember.
My grandmother and my world inside my grandfather's garden had become the most important things in my life that year and were now dissolved and gone. I have reached the point in my story where I have explained to you why I want to tell you my story, and why I am telling you about this part of my life in the first place.
I believe that I am the man I am today because of those two important occurrences in my childhood and their abrupt removal from my life which has shaped me into whom I was meant to become.
I have indulged my imagination and have told the stories that I have created out of the thinnest imaginings possible and then again out of the strongest urges imaginable and have made people laugh and cry and yearn for even more, and in doing so you dear friend have made me a very wealthy man. But now I feel that I must lay down my pen for much more important endeavors.