Smoke Days are the Opposite of Snow Days

The smoke has cleared now, but for four days the winds turned toward us, gathering us in ash. The sun was red in the sky, so moonlike I thought, “it’s a full sun.” Since the onset of annual smoke seasons the last few years, I’ve seen how it can turn the sky into a glowing orange bowl, or dull the house across the street into a gray silhouette. This time the smoke made it look like dusk all day, everything dim and pinkish. When I went outside close to midnight even the dead dark was milky.

The fires are still burning, but everything here has opened back up to sky scraping blue because the winds are in our favor. Now we just dust the gray off the patio chairs before we sit. The air is hot but we drink it in.

During the smoke, Miko was in a panic to get back into the world. She would cry at the door, bark at the window, paw her “go outside” and “go for a walk” buttons over and over. I couldn’t explain the danger to her and her hummingbird heart. Eventually I gave in. We went for a walk in the smoke-dark. We have to live and this is the world, I thought. No one else was out. They knew better. We turned the corner and I saw one neighbor dart out of his front door alone, over to the BBQ that was billowing its own plumes, adding to everything. I imagined him holding his breath as he flipped his family’s dinner before slipping back into the cooler and cleaner air inside.

Smoke is all the small bits that escape total transformation by fire. Incomplete combustion. It’s a sad kind of survival: defiant forest body that did not burn up, but is no longer a tree, cracked to dust and settling into the tissues of pliant lungs hundreds of miles away. There’s nothing beautiful to see here.

It was on that walk with Miko that I was thinking to myself that smoke days are the opposite of snow days. Things halt, but not in a whimsical way. The animal in me cannot get cozy to wait it out, but wants to bolt. Though, even with my restlessness, with Miko’s restlessness, I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. This smoke light was a rose haze, casting thick shadows with soft edges, and trees seem to glow from the ground up. The forests and fields and neighborhoods are burning. There are all the reasons why this is happening. There is all the grief. And still, I walk into the world asking, what color is it? Saying, look how the light has changed. In this way, I am able to come closer, to stay with things as they are. To breathe it in.

Now there is an enormous yellow butterfly with pale wings zipping all around in the curly willow. I wonder how its tiny spiracles did with the ashen air. Then I wonder if perhaps it emerged from its chrysalis just this morning and has only ever seen things are they are in this moment, bright and clear.

At one point when I was young, I hoped to save the world. Sweeping, I know. And a seed of that hasn’t changed — whenever I see or feel suffering, everything in me wants to move toward relieving it for all of us. But my grand aspiration has shifted. I want now to be with the world, whatever it goes through. I want to be with my self, I want to be with you. I want to see the colors.

love,
brit

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