Wildfire season is back once again and my days of enjoying the fresh spring air are over. As are, thankfully, my days of sweating at night because it’s too warm for me to sleep comfortably on my memory foam mattress but not warm enough to turn on the AC. I mean, hell, with the arrival of the warmer days, the winds have shifted and sometimes even a massive cold front that brings the outside temperature down into the 40s doesn’t have enough wind blowing in the right ways to cool my apartent down (my bedroom was in the low seventies, nearly thirty degrees above the outside ambient temperature, and it was miserable). But those days are over now because it’s finally warm enough to turn the AC on and the sudden arrival of wildfire smoke means I peobably shouldn’t be sleeping with my windows open anyway. Gotta let the air filter through my AC unit first, to clean up some of the smoke. Or so I’d say if my AC unit actually had a proper filter and not a tightly-woven wire-mesh “filter” that clogs instantly and yet never actually cleans the air of anything but the largest particles (of which there is an endless supply thanks to my neighborhood trees and my pet bird). Instead of relying on that for another smokey summer, I’ve bought myself four hundred dollars of air purifiers (they were MASSIVELY on sale, so this would have easily been 600-700 bucks worth of air purifiers any other time) and spread them around my apartment.

So far, they’re doing a pretty good job. Not only have they kept the smokey flavor of the air to the currently coming directly off my AC unit (it’s not that bad, to be clear, I just have a very sensitive nose), but they cleaned up the bacon smell in my aparment after I cooked a bunch to put in soups and crumble into potato dishes over the weekend. It was done so quickly that I barely even had enough time to realize that the bacon smell had disappeared. No lingering, headache-inducing heavy cooking odors for me anymore! Now my air is cycled and cleaned and all the horrible little particules are stripped from it. And I only have to do maintenance every few months! Clean the cloth filter every so often and then replace the interior filter every nine-ish months. We’ll see if that holds true in my exteremly particulated air, but even every six months wouldn’t be too bad. I could manage that. Especially when I know how nice the air feels once it’s been filtered and I’m no longer inhaling a bunch of bird feather dust kicked up by a cockatiel that disintegrates her feathers during preening rather than removing tufts or whatever it is other birds do.

Unfortunately, even the best air purifiers aren’t going to do anything about the ever-present danger of climate change or the newly on-my-mind danger of my apartment getting burned down by a fluke accident. It happened to one of my coworkers and almost happened to me via my downstairs neighbor’s improperly installed thermostat (the quality of the maintenance has dropped pretty significantly in my apartment complex over the last year, since the really good guy got moved to a different set of complexes). The fact that both of those happened within a couple weeks of each other is incredibly chilling and makes me even more paranoid about fire (and, by extension, electrical) safety. I’m not to the point of unplugging everything when I leave my apartment, but everything that could benefit from a surge protector now has one and the only things that don’t have one are the things that pose the least risk, like lamps. None of which will do me any good if any of my neighbors aren’t careful or if the current wildfire season spread far enough. We’re still in drought conditions, recent rain nonwithstanding (which is also known for exacerbating conditions by allows the growth of a bunch of greenery that then becomes flammable as it dries out), so it could easily be a really bad year even with the state’s natural resources department doing regular controlled burns to manage the grasslands. Being in a swampy area doesn’t help much if most of the swamps have been filled in or drained as part of developing the land for commercial and residential use.

All I can do about this particular aspect of the weather is write it off as just one more source of anxiety. Just like power outages, tornadoes, and hail storms. I have no control over when those things happen or how much damage they might cause me, so all I can do is take sensible precautions and make sure my renter’s insurance is up to snuff (and then some). And buy air purifiers so at least my lungs won’t be harmed by the distant fires in Canada that are already doing quite enough damage to everyone who lives (or lived) near them. At least having the AC on means I can sleep a little better at night and not wake up as sweaty each morning. This is going to be a rough summer if it gets much warmer than this, though. I’m not sure if my AC unit could keep up with a real scorcher, especially given that all of the trees that used to protect my unit from the morning sun beating in my windows have been cut down over the last two years. Really, this apartment complex is basically pulling itself apart, piece by piece, and I hope I can get out of here before some horrible disaster strikes due to the negligence of the management.