School let out early today, and so we trudged out of our air-conditioned classrooms into the dry heat. We San Diegans don't often encounter weather like this. In fact, the last time I remember this kind of scorching wind was back when we had those fires, years back.
I walked home, unaccompanied by my friend, who left to meet her mom at Albertsons.
I like this heat, this desert parch. I like the harsh sun and drying wind. But I do not like smoke, nor the wail of sirens. I can no longer see the former, due to the positioning of my house, but above the restless sway of palm trees, the screech of tires and the scream of sirens are ever present.
I have seen smoke a hundred thousand times before, but it seems like I have never before been confronted like this. They said that the fire was far away, and the wind was blowing away from us, but that's not the way it seemed. If you tilted your head back, way back, the smoke made clouds in the cloudless sky. But if you followed the trail of clouds back, they turned angry. They turned blackish and ugly. What surprised me most was the speed that the smoke moved. No sooner had it churned out than it was out, blackening the sky like charcol on paper. You always hear of smoke being described as great, billowing columns, but I tell you now that this was like a production line, only instead of cars or toasters, the factory turned out clouds.
Strange, isn't it?
This weather is definitely fire-friendly. Yet although this fire has appeared to spiral out of control, although it has released tons of ash and carbon dioxide into our dirtied and wearied heavens (by which I mean the ozone), although thousands-if not millions-of dollars of property have been damaged or lost, although people's homes have been stripped of memory and reduced to charred bits, I cannot find myself regretting this incessant, intolerable, heat.
There is, unmistakeably, something nostalgic about this. What exactly I can't say-the memory has been lost and all that it left for me was a wisp, a tendril, a mood. I don't know what. I feel floral curtains waving, and iced tea, collecting water droplets in crystal glasses. Perhaps it is something I have read, a long time ago.
To all that live in my area: stay safe. and hydrated.
As for, me...well, let's just say I'm signing off now, to pack an overnight bag.
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