On Wildfires in France, Bad Air, and the First Rain in Weeks — a writer’s diary entry, 20th of July

The smoke came in on the wind three days ago and it still hasn’t properly gone. I keep the shutters shut against it but it finds its way in regardless, that thin grey smell of somewhere burning that isn’t here yet but isn’t nearly far enough away either. The fires are south and east of us, they’re saying, the dry hills down toward the coast, and the wind has spent the week carrying it all up the valley to us like a letter nobody asked for. I woke yesterday to ash on the outside sill. Not much of it. A grey dusting, fine as flour, the ghost of a forest that had been standing the week before.

I’ve never known the air here go so wrong. The sky turned the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges, and the sun sat up in it like a coin somebody had breathed on. The mairie sent one of those messages round telling the old and the young and the ill to stay inside and shut everything and not run the ventilation. I am none of those things exactly and I did it anyway. I sat in the shut-up dark of the downstairs with a wet cloth pressed into the gap under the door and felt, for the first time in a long while, genuinely small. Not in a bad way. Just accurately sized against a thing much larger than me.

I could taste it by the second day. You pass someone outside the boulangerie and you don’t so much say bonjour as exchange a look that means, yes, this too, and there’s a strange honesty a bad sky pulls out of a village. Nobody was pretending it was fine. I lit no candles all week. It felt wrong to add even a match to the world while the hills were doing what they were doing.

And then last night, the rain. I heard it before I understood what it was, a sound I’d half forgotten, a proper drumming on the tiles, and I was out of bed and at the window before I’d decided to be. It came down hard and warm and it did not stop for hours. I opened the back door and I stood in it. I know exactly how that sounds. I stood in the doorway with the rain coming off the roof in a sheet and I let it soak the whole front of me and I did not care one bit, because that first smell of rain on ground that’s been begging for it is the closest thing I know to being forgiven for something you didn’t even do.

I put a bowl out on the step to catch it. Rain after fire feels like water worth keeping. I’ve no clever plan for it. I’ll wash the windows with it, or the doorstep, or my own two hands, some small thing that says I noticed, thank you, I won’t take this for granted. The moon’s filling now, a waxing thing thickening toward the half, still a good week and more off full, and I found myself thanking that too, which makes no sense, the rain being nothing to do with the moon at all. I did it anyway. Some nights you thank whatever’s up there and sort out the theology in the morning.

The air is clean today. Washed. I can smell the vines again instead of the burning. I opened one shutter, and then I opened all of them.