(My heart goes out to everyone in California currently dealing with these fires)

Growing up, I lived atop a high-desert hill that was mottled with Juniper trees, sagebrush, and red volcanic rocks. The lawn around our home was speckled with sheet-grass that would stick to your socks and stab at your ankles like tiny swords wielded by miniature soldiers desperate to take down the giants trouncing through their lands. 

All of the stars were visible at night, the entire milkyway, like an ocean of diamonds in the darkness. When we were washing dishes, we could see gorgeous mountains out our kitchen window, the Cascades, and other divine peaks. Beautiful sweeping vistas that I dream about even today. 

Rains would come in April, leaving a marshy sucking soil attempting to suction the shoes right off your feet. 

Winters would be a wonderland of snow, if we were lucky. A pink sky would give way to grand flakes that would land, freeze, land again. A skiff of white power over a sheet of pale ice, tearing at our shins if our boots crunched too deep. Perfect sledding hills that ended with us buried in the branches of the evergreen trees we had neglected to steer clear from. 

Autumn was generally pleasant, save for the new angle of the sun driving the solar rays directly into our eyeballs every ride to and from school. Every walk up the steep hill, past the barbed-wire fence. A light breeze to help or hinder your trek, depending on the day. 

Summers though. Summers brought with them a melancholy, a heat and suffering that persevered throughout the schoolbreak. Droughts would be rampant in the summer, the high-desert earth unable to provide water enough for flora, fauna, and an abundance of floundering homosapiens. 

And thus would come the smoke. 

A pervasive smell. 

Pleasant perhaps, around Christmas, wafting occasionally from crackling logs. 

Devastating outside in the hottest season as reports trickled in of the numerous fires burning vast acreages of land just down the way. Decimating homes and livelihoods. Sending wildlife scattering to survive, to find a new habitat, a new home untouched by the soot and ash of nature’s tinderbox burning with many years of unchecked undergrowth.

Firefighters struggled to contain the blazes, to keep damage minimal. But every summer, it was the same story. Rampant fires, unchecked, often manmade, roaring eternally throughout the land. 

But the Sunsets, oh the Sunsets.

Hues of crimson and amber, like an orb of blood in the sky. Scattered light filtered through curtains of poisonous gases. Incredible to behold. 

But when the sun went down…

I would lie awake at night terrified. 

Plotting.

How would I grab all of our cats?

Would my sister be okay?

My parents?

Could we make it down the hill in time?

Would we get caught in the blaze and burn to death?

Fire travels uphill faster than downhill, and there was only one path down.

Would we lose everything?

I was lucky. 

We moved eventually.

I’m under no illusions that the fires won’t follow me. Across the country. Across the world. The Earth is becoming so extreme. 

Fires and floods.

Twisters and typhoons.

The last time I visited my childhood home, I could not even see the mountains through a cloud of smoke. Through three states on my Westcoast Trip, smoke blotted out the sky, hid the stars from view, let not so much as a mountain’s shadow through its opaque curtains. 

But the Sunsets.

The Sunsets were incredible.