It’s that time of year again, the scary season when the sky turns black in the middle of the day, and sun looks like a huge red ball in the sky.
The light comes through the windows and it’s all wrong, like it’s coming from the wrong direction for the time of day. Orangey-yellow cast to everything inside, and just grey outside if you are dumb enough to venture out.
And the smell. I opened the clothes dryer this morning to empty it, and found that everything in it smelled like smoke. The smell came in through the vent.
Well, I was stupid, for a bit, and discovered this outside my back door. It was swirling around in a little ashy-tornado by my back step.

It was everywhere and it’s really scary because if the ash can come this far, could an ember? I’m all the way in Long Beach, so the fires are pretty far away, but out of the 5 years we’ve lived in this house, this is the most scary ash we’ve had here. In the past, it’s just been the grey fluffy stuff, but this was black and white and grey and everywhere, coiled up in the garden hose, all over the car and collected in little piles by the strange geography of our backyard.

As we stepped over it, J said, “Ugh, that’s probably someone’s back porch.”