When I was 57, shortly after I moved into my small space in Berkeley, I fired up a smoke in the little shed/office across the deck from the one-room cottage. I won’t spend words defending that action; the smoke was extinguished long ago and that’s not what this lesson is about.

The event I am reporting is that the smoke, wavery and rising like smoke does, set off the till-then-unnoticed detector in the plywood ceiling above me. “WTF?!” I thought and probably blurted, as the adrenaline shot me up from my seat and powered me to yank the detector down, rush the unit outside, and strip it of its 9 volt.

And then I thought, “how silly.” I chuckled as I considered what might have prompted seller Jon to install a detector in a 100 sq. ft shed. I mean, if I’m in the shed I’m going to see, hear, and smell the fire. And if I’m not in the shed I won’t hear the alarm.

Obviously the shed no longer contains a smoke detector. And the extra one above the cottage closet has been removed as well. But I can’t do anything (or haven’t yet) about the smoke alarm that’s wired into the ceiling above my bed. Or the unit in Eugene, way up high on the two-story wall, supposedly hard-wired and never in need of a battery but it beeped at me a year after installation, because it turned out to have a back-up battery and that needed replacement. My builder buddy told me the battery it came with may have been in it, on a shelf, for years; the new one he installed really should last forever. The Berkeley detector doesn’t have a back up battery, but it puts out a heart-rending set of three squawks when it loses or regains current, rendering me unwilling to return to sleep during a nighttime outage, for fear of the aural attack that will awaken me when the power resumes.

I don’t need a smoke detector. I live in one room. The room is bigger than the shed, but not so big that I won’t sense the fire if I’m there. Some contend that’s not what the detector is for; it’s to wake me so a fire doesn’t kill me while I sleep. I respond with the architecture; one cottage has a brick wall from bed to exterior doors and the other has a back door next to the bed. Really, if the fire is going to be so effective that it can take me out, without waking me … well, I’m not that young any more, and like others I occasionally consider how to time the exit so I don’t have to suffer the terminality of Western death, and maybe that fire would be my last friend.