NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T here was a day the sky went green in my childhood. I was as old that day as my daughter was this week. To tell the truth, it only went green for a few moments, as I tore through Halcyon Park from my friend’s house back to mine. We had been told that a green sky was a sign of a tornado. I wanted to get home, just to be in my home, whatever was befalling us that summer day. That’s where kids should be, right? I’ll never forget the intensity and unpredictability of the wind on that run home.

The first thing I wanted to do when I got there was run up to see my grandfather’s ancient-looking barometer. Would its thin needle-indicators be quivering at the edge of their reach, pointing urgently at the calamity ready to swallow us?

Of course, I was highly disappointed to see that the damn thing remained broken and was doing nothing portentous. And that disappointment was compounded by the further failure of the tornado to show up at all. I would not be gifted with the summertime spectacle of watching my house and loved ones torn apart in a twister, as I was thrown ever upward, toward a suitably violent but genuinely epic childhood death. What a gyp! I just watched the Weather Channel through a vicious thunderstorm, pacing around the living room, my grandmother in the kitchen patiently enduring my updates on the progress of the storm.

I don’t know why, but unusual weather sticks to the memory. An incredibly humid day last year, when the lilac bushes were really perfuming everything around my house, burned itself into the dark matter of my brain. My youngest son and I played his primitive version of catch at the time in our front yard. I made a note in my journal that when I’m on my deathbed, lilacs should be brought to me, to summon this happy memory for me and set me blazing with gratitude before the Particular Judgment.

There was another day of unusual color in 2021, on a family trip to the famous Donegal ring fort Grianán of Aileach. Until we got within actual spitting distance of this ancient and rebuilt political ruin, only three colors existed: a small sliver of dark green and purple heather up to our shins, and then endless, impenetrable, sheet-like white fog from there to the heavens. We huddled among the ancient stones. My father had told me tall tales in childhood about our descent from the high kings of Ulster. My children skipped around their grand inheritance — the millennia-old seat of our family’s royal prerogatives, long since vanquished, with detached amusement. I thanked God that if we couldn’t remain kings of this mysterious place, we had at least moved up from the old family trade upon which this power was built: stealing cattle from those bastards in Connacht.

This week’s day of Orange was a recuperative one. I had been up late the night before working on an overdue piece for National Review, the magazine founded by William F. Buckley. You probably have heard of it if you’re reading this on its namesake website. My youngest son had pink eye and was home from school. He slept on the couch half the morning, but then demanded to watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie on our Apple TV. Without the presence of his usual babysitter in our home, he asked me to cuddle him on the couch. I found myself cupping his feet in my hands and wondering how much longer I could enjoy these moments with a young son. I woke up in Act III when Donkey Kong and Mario are making their way toward the final affray. That’s when I saw how damn tangerine things had gotten outside.

I took the dog out for a quick walk. The smell of the smoke was just exactly like a wood-chip smoker, minus the brisket. All the dry-throat feeling, nothing to savor.

Very little news penetrated my home about the scale of the disaster in Canada that must be causing this smoke to pile up in the Northeast. The New York Times said this: “Climate research suggests that heat and drought associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires in Canada.” But when you searched Google News for Canadian drought, some of the top items remarked on the country’s “Stanley Cup Drought” — not unusual dry weather.

When my third-grader daughter walked out of her school on Wednesday, she shielded her nose from the smoky smell. She joined her kindergartner brother in the van, and the two of them started abominating Canada. “This is because of Canada. Ugh!” my daughter explained to us, exasperated. “Why is Canada doing this to us? Are they stupid?!” my son asked, with his pipsqueak rage, followed by a laugh at the word “stupid.” I feigned great pride that my children had somehow caught my zealous appreciation for forest management, properly done, along with corresponding and just wrath at the Trudeau government and several Canadian provinces for their serial failures. Get it together, guys!

We drove home, and I saw the hated masks return to the streets of our little suburb. I felt the pang of dread about being yelled at. And I tasted again the great murderous anger that bothered me from September 2020 through the summer of 2022. But, then it occurred to me that the cloth masks seemed more justifiable now — at least, as an experiment. My shoulders relaxed.

The total environment was odd, and my phone lit up throughout the day with people sharing GIFs and stills from Blade Runner 2049, which had several scenes set in desolated orange environments like our own. But I wasn’t like Ryan Gosling stalking through a post-apocalypse. I was among these three children, all of them marveling at the strangeness of the world. I told them not to be alarmed by the air, and they trusted me — sometimes the sky is just going to be smoky and the color of terra-cotta. And the orange day was for me a moment to take stock of what these three children are becoming, how I’m running out of times they will ask for “cuddles” or are cracking each other up from booster seats. Thanks be to God for my singed throat, my itchy nose, the burnt sky, and all the depthless blessings I enjoy in them. The orange smoke rises around us like incense — carrying my gratitude and petitions, and their laughter at the expense of all Canada.