Damaging mirror on the wall
To the right of my bed, beneath one of my three bedroom windows, is an upholstered recliner. I sit there with my legs up, writing on my laptop, as I am doing right now. On the chair back, on the left-hand side, are two burn marks the size of quarters, both charred rings with holes in the center. Poke your finger in there and you will feel the foam stuffing.
They are not cigarette burns; there are no smokers in the house. They are not from candles left unattended; I don’t light candles up here.
The burn holes are the result of a freakish conflation of two everyday things coming from different directions and meeting at a point that, given a few more minutes, could have been disastrous.
Last Saturday afternoon, I was doing housework and helping with some maintenance outside. At some point, I walked into the bedroom and smelled something burning. I first thought of my laptop computer, which was attached to a charging cord plugged into the wall. Was there a short?
As I followed the smell, I noticed smoke coming from the side of the chair. A ring of orange glowed in one spot, and two inches away from that was a second spot with curled black edges around a center hole.
I followed the smoke to the window behind the chair, and then followed it back into the room and onto the magnifying mirror on the nightstand. In an unlikely bit of synergy, the mirror captured the sun through the window, intensified it with its magnifying glass, and cast a beam of combustible sunshine onto the chair
I grabbed the mirror and tossed it into my (dark) makeup case and then put a wet cloth on the burn holes. I called for my family to come and see the weird thing that might have burned down the chair – if not the house.
We’ve all heard of this, haven’t we? On a sunny day, if you hold a magnifying glass just so, you can burn a blade of grass. On a famous episode of “Little House on the Prairie,” Mary Ingalls is stranded following a stagecoach accident. She languishes over a hillside until a passerby sees smoke and comes to her rescue. The smoke was the result of a fire started when sunlight hit a pair of eyeglasses that had landed on the ground.
That was good storytelling, because it was fiction. I don’t like telling my true version because I feel like I should have known better. I sit in that chair to put on my makeup, and that morning – like all mornings – I’d left the mirror on the nightstand.
You don’t hear about it much, but magnifying glasses and mirrors do cause house fires. It seems that Great Britain is a hotbed for this kind of activity: a quick Internet check turned up half a dozen such fires in the past couple of years in London. Magnifying shaving mirrors tend to start fires on bathroom curtains. Even glass jars on sunny windowsills are suspect.
I’m glad I was moving all around the house that day. I like to think that the chair was made of flame-retardant fabric and that, if I didn’t walk back in there in time, the worse I would have lost would have been the chair. But who knows.
So think about where you keep your magnifying mirrors, and about their proximity to sunshine and fabrics. If you use a magnifying glass, be careful where you keep that, too.
Mirror + Sunshine = Fire. I have two holes in my favorite chair that say so.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.