Today I watched my younger daughter — the one I used to call “Small One” in all my online posts — the one who is officially, and will always be, my baby — fight fires. No, really. She is in training to be a certified firefighter and EMT by the time she graduates from high school. So she and her cohort gather on the occasional Saturday and practice connecting and priming firehoses, battering down locked doors, donning oxygen masks, entering dark houses, dragging victims out into fresh air. It is thrilling and impressive and kind of scary to watch.

You can scale the walls
break the windows, staunch the blood.
You can fight fire.