According to local media outlets, the air quality here dipped into the “unhealthy” category yesterday. It didn’t seem that bad when we were walking in the early evening, but it was definitely smoky. We could barely see the islands when we were at the beach and the Sun was that red color that is a sure sign of smoke in the air. We have been leaving the house buttoned up because we don’t want the smoky smell inside. We don’t suffer from big allergies, but the smoke makes our eyes water and we find that we sneeze quite a bit more after being out in it. Fortunately for us, we have central air conditioning in our home, though we are aware that we are using more electricity than if we simply allowed the house to cool naturally by opening windows.

One of the effects of the smoke is that it seems to trap the surface moisture near the ground. The fog from the ocean doesn’t lift as much. It also keeps the temperatures lower. It got down to 55 degrees overnight and the humidity is holding right at 85% which is enough to make it feel a bit chilly outside. That means that our house is staying at a comfortable temperature without needing the air conditioning at the moment.

We are talking about the smoke, but we are trying hard not to complain about it. Across the border, 30,000 homes have been evacuated due to raging wildfires. The government of British Columbia has declared an emergency. People are being advised to stay away from certain regions so that space is available for fire fighters and those who have been forced to evacuate.

Meanwhile, in California, people are being forced to leave their homes because of encroaching floods as a once-in-decades storm makes its way north.

We really have nothing about which to complain.

Last night Susan came down and asked me for the address of some friends. She had written them a card and wanted to address the envelope and get it in the mail. I looked at my digital address book on my phone and discovered that I had phone numbers and email addresses, but didn’t have a physical address for that particular couple. I know that I once had it, but I don’t know where it is. I also couldn’t remember having exchanged messages by the US mail with them. They live on the opposite side of the country and we correspond by email and text message, but I guess we haven’t sent letters. It isn’t a big problem, we can easily obtain the address from our daughter and send the card without needing to ask them directly for their address. It is just one more sign that the times in which we re living are changing.

Someone should inform the companies that prepare fundraising mailings for nonprofit organizations that the times are changing. They seem to operate as if we are doing a lot of correspondence by mail. I have a stack of return address labels that have been sent to me. I use individual labels from time to time, but the new ones keep coming into the house at a rate much higher than I am using them. Right now I have labels from nine different organizations in my pile. There are multiple sheets of labels from some organizations. What is interesting about the address labels is that most of them are from organizations that we don’t support financially. Because of widespread sharing of addresses among nonprofits, we receive appeals from more organizations than we can support. We prefer to give a few larger donations to organizations rather than send a larger number of smaller donations. It isn’t that we are opposed to the mission of many of these organizations. It is just that some seem to have more immediate needs and match our values a bit more closely than others.

I have a pet peeve about organizations that continue to engage in aggressive fundraising when they have sufficient funds to pursue their mission. There are charities that actually raised more money than they spent last year. They seem to be less needy of my donation than some other organizations. And it bothers me that the organizations spend so much money appealing to me. It probably isn’t very expensive, but printing and mailing all of those custom return address labels isn’t free.

Along with an accumulation of return address labels, we seem to be inundated by paper calendars. There is a limit to how many calendars we need. Susan keeps a paper calendar. I keep my calendar on my phone and computer. I don’t need a calendar to hang on the wall in order to know what day it is or which appointments I have to keep. But, like return address labels, calendars continue to arrive at our home. The calendars have beautiful photographs and we keep them in the art supplies box. Our grandchildren like to have a few pictures to cut out for collage and other uses in their crafts.

Smoke, return address labels, calendars . . . there are lots of things that come to us without our having asked for them. Perhaps they remind us of the many ways our lives are connected to others. Even when we don’t send money, we are connected to pets and ducks and trout and children with cancer and birds and butterflies and bees. Even when we aren’t thinking of them, our neighbors are facing devastating fires and incredible traumatic disruption of their lives as they fear they might lose their homes. Even when we don’t put the calendars on our walls, there are people who are planting trees and working to save bird habitat to add to the quality of life in our world.

And all of those various things are giving me another topic for my essays. There are times when I am unsure of what topic I will pursue. Usually, however, all I have to do to find a topic is to look outside my window or at the piles of paper on my desk. It worked today.