Air quality

We live only in our house now. Our lives have been constrained for six months now, but looking back on those constraints, they barely seem meaningful. We went to the library to pick up books (couldn't go in or browse), we took walks with friends (couldn't get close to each other), we lay in the hammock in the yard. We biked to the grocery store to shop (wore a mask, stayed away from people). But now the west coast is on fire, and Portland is full of the ghosts of forests.  This is how it looked at 8:30 this morning out our window (except a lot yellower than the phone camera will accept). It's not fog, it's smoke.

The air quality has been terrible for nearly a week now, and the last few days it's been beyond terrible. We were not prepared for this - don't have air purifiers or the right kind of furnace filters, and only realized that we needed them after the stores were already sold out. We can stay inside with the windows shut, which is more than a lot of people can do right now, but that's all. We have headaches and sore throats and our lungs ache. I am so starved for fresh air that I dream about suffocating. There's nowhere we can go, because it's like this everywhere around us. 

It feels emotionally extra-difficult coming on top of months of quarantine - even the little things we could control before we can't control now. We can't control anything. We're just waiting inside our box for something to change.