It’s a popular thing to discuss. It’s given the newspaper almost a week of capitalized headlines. Yep: The Fires. The biggest ones in the history of California. Lots of people have lots to say on that matter, so I thought I would follow the trend.

Every Tuesday I go to my friend Maya’s house and play. She lives in Oakland, far away from my house. It takes a long and stressful drive for my mom to get there, and there are all sorts of distracting signs there. Such as a curved sign that had different streaks of the colors of the rainbow on it. In yellow there was “Low”, orange was “Likely” red was “High” and purple was “Very High.” There was an arrow pointing to a streak of color on it. Below it it said “Fire risk for today.” The arrow was pointing to “High.”

Kind of scary, right?

Another thing: I spent my first day ever completely indoors because of the smoke. My mom had purchased masks for us on Amazon, but they weren’t going to come until the next day. All day I had to hang out inside, and when I finished my school work I couldn’t go outside and play with my friends. The smoke was so bad that my mom put up so many air filtering plants that our house looked like a jungle, and school was optional for kids in my town. I hoped we would get some wind soon.

The air was entirely grey when I went outside.

Every time that I read the newspaper in the morning I got more depressed about the situation.

But the situation with fires got a little better, and the wind started blowing the other way, but even now I’m nervous about going outside.

I’m staying inside and hoping that the fires burn themselves out soon.