SAN FRANCISCO – The new thing is to look up at the sky even before we get up in the morning to brush our teeth and make coffee here. We then turn our attention to the internet to see if our eyes are deluded.
“Purple again,” I told my wife this morning. Not the sky. It was the color of a suit, like a child taking dirty fingers and rubbing them all over the horizon. Purple is the color on the air quality chart. That means we’ve created “very hygienic,” which is full of tiny particles in our air, which, when it comes to children, is dangerous to breathe in their soft pink lungs. And not so great for those of us who already have a few miles on our lungs.
During the coronavirus epidemic, our last refuge was to stay indoors, but when things keep going to this purple, trouble goes inside. Thanks to wild firefighters, our domestic air filters have begun to tell us that things have become healthier to our home – bad air is also managing to leak through closed windows and doors.
So we took one of our air purifiers to pass through the room so that both of our children could use the S.O.T. (Soot in blood stream) without taking S.O.T.G. (School on the go) can. We clean each room, then turn on the device, and I do trials to maintain my optimism which is my hallmark and dad’s duty. When you start reaching for comparisons you can say things are bad, like: Well, we could be in Flanders in 1918. (Maybe the rose color on my glasses is really ash.)
In reality, I don’t have to go back to Belgium during the First World War to learn that things could get worse. We could be in the Portland suburbs or elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, right now Circa. There, the ashes in the sky come with a raging blaze that makes real refugees, i.e. those who are running from death can take with them.
So yes, we are privileged: a roof over the head, a freezer full of meat and a crisp filled with vegetables. My wife and I have a job and no one close to us has died from that terrible virus.
“I’ve had migraines for three days because of the weak air (or self-pity, or both),” he said. My wife is a neurologist who specializes in treating migraines and says it will help when you sit in the dark. But I can tell you that Wednesday morning – when we woke up and looked up at the sky and it was the orange-black of Halloween – did a little less to calm the headaches in the darkness of the whole day.
I am a science reporter, and it is difficult to travel around the world and from coffee to nose and lungs, taking advantage of population density and other modern factors. , And to take advantage of our human spread in the urban / wild connection to forest fires and to turn our manifest destiny into much grass. Mother Nature is cautious, you could say there is a really clinical and intolerable way to look at things at the point of being fatal.
What my family wants is not some “context”, but going out and playing. Or even inside and play.
“Dad, can I come out of my room after school?” My son, 12 years old, asked me this afternoon when he nodded at my home office fee. It is called S.O.T.G. And with his turn with the air purifier, will be under stop orders in his bedroom.
“I’ll check the air,” I told him.
I looked outside, and it was yellow-gray like a smoker’s tooth. I looked on the internet and it was purple, even worse than this morning, the air quality index now reads 228, which is a high level of “high hygiene”.
This weekend was supposed to be a relief, a resume of some social distance game including baseball and tennis practice for my son, tennis for me, maybe a family bike ride. Impossible now. I just look at the sky and the internet, and only see red (just healthy) or even yellow. It will be moderate.
