It was late January when I was in my early teens. My mom and dad had bought me a chemistry set for Christmas. I had made everything you could imagine, from bars of soaps to tanning leather. I was not very popular at school. At this time the fad at school was setting off M-80 firecrackers. I thought that if I could just make one at home it could go over real big with my friends at school. So late one night I broke out the test tubes. I also got a can of gunpowder from my dad's room. He used this for the old muzzle-loading gun for hunting. I proceeded to fill a test tube with gunpowder. I placed a fuse in the top, lit it and stepped far away. It just fizzled and went out. I tried this two are three times with out results. I began to get brave. I lit a match and dropped it on top with the same results. By this time I had just got plain stupid. I held the match to the top of the test tube of gunpowder. It did not take long to get results. There was "pouf". All I could see were spots in front of my eyes. As the spots cleared I saw the room was completely filled with smoke and my new sweater that I was wearing had this huge round hole in it like something from the cartoons. My face was completely blackened. I panicked. All I could think about was what my mom was going to do when she saw this mess. I shucked off the smoldering sweater and stuffed it in the closet. I cleaned my face as best I could. I raised the windows to air out the smoke. Well I figured that by this time I should get some sleep. It was pretty smelly and still had the lingering smoke in my room. I went to the bedroom of my two brothers and fell asleep on the floor there. I had just gotten to sleep when I heard my mother screaming at the top of her lungs, "Get out of the house, its on fire". I was not thinking at first what might have caused it. I ran out of the house. Then I remembered the TV that my mom had just won. She was so proud of it. She said it was the only thing she had ever won. It was just in the kitchen so I made a mad dash to get it. I picked it up and proceeded to tug at the cord. It was still plugged in behind the counter. I was too nervous to reach around behind and unplug it. Then I heard my mother screaming somewhere in the distance "oh my god, Where is Dale". Dale was my youngest brother. I dropped the TV and started back to his room. There was this huge line of fire shooting across the hall between his room and me. I did not even think. I made a dash and slid under this column of flame that was shooting from my room. I got to his room and looked under the bed and in the closet but could not find him. I jumped out of his bedroom and once in the yard someone told me that he was at the neighbor's house. The dogs were going crazy. I was starting to come out of panic mode enough to realize the surrounding events. By this time I had realized what had happened. That sweater somehow caught afire in the closet. I was now going into another panic mode. All I could think was what my dad was going to do to my behind when he found out what had happened. I remember walking down the road in front of the house crying to my mom. Some how when she asked me what was wrong I thought to tell her I was crying because I had broken the screen when I exited my brother room. I remember that the house was completely ablaze. There were bullets whistling from through the air. My dad kept quite an arsenal for hunting. I remember vividly going to the neighbor's house that night. When I got there someone noticed these huge blisters on my fingers. I said" I got those when I made that mad dash to save my brother. I knew that they probably were from the explosion. We lost everything that night. I did not even have clothes for school the next day. The insurance company brought us a mobile home out for temporary living. Everyone brought us food and clothes for weeks. It was not long that the insurance company had settled to build us a new home. I do remember that some of the neighbors were complaining about the mobile home. It was a neighborhood that was restricted and did not allow mobile homes. There are some really stupid people in the world, not excluding myself sometimes.