With a sky full of wildfire smoke, how do I give my children the carefree summer they deserve?

This is a First Person column by Magdalena Olszanowski, a writer and communications professor who lives in Montreal. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

My family and I were eating breakfast when we heard on the radio that wildfires are raging out of control in northern Quebec, and that wind would soon carry the smoke down to Montreal.

That was on Monday, June 5, and far more of our province was burning than usual. But I couldn't understand what it meant for us in a major urban centre. Wildfires might be ubiquitous in weather reports elsewhere, but not here in Montreal.

When I followed my 17-month old daughter to the yard, as I do every morning while my seven-year-old son is at school, I immediately noticed something was different.

The leaves of our green ash tree were veneered in a pink glow that a sunset usually brings. Except it was not even 10 a.m. I shook the branches. The sky wasn't the neon-orange blaze I've seen in the news about the wildfires along the West Coast. This colour, an atomic tangerine mixed with coral, was eerie and beguiling.

My daughter and I stayed outside for about an hour. An hour seemed reasonable given the air quality, but this was a made-up time frame as I had never encountered weather conditions of "smoke" in place of "cloudy" or "partly sunny."

Later, my son tells me his school trip to Mount Royal was cancelled. Students weren't even allowed outside because of the smoke. I do my best to help him process his anger over the cancelled field trip, while carefully treading my own anger and grief.

The next morning, the smoky air turned the sun outside our window into a halo. It looked like the world I see when my glasses are bedaubed with my children's sticky fingers. Though I know it to be toxic, the air somehow smelled like cinnamon sticks with star anise and honey on the stove, like all the firsts experienced at summer camp my children may never get to have.

"Air quality is another thing on the morning checklist now," my partner exclaimed. I agreed, and saved the AQI index to my browser toolbar.

We saw an AQI reading of over 400; it seemed alarming but completely abstract. My son asked what it means. The air quality is bad, I explained, and we should avoid the outdoors.

"Bad how?" he asked.

Air quality readings, radar maps, time frames — this is intricate quantified data that is a result of the climate emergency but I have no idea how to make sense of it in a way a seven-year-old would understand.

I brought my children outside and left the windows open for longer than I probably should have, because my common sense and carbon dioxide reader tell me outside air is best.

Then the anxiety kicked in: there's nothing common or sensible about our times.

My partner, whose resolve often holds our family together, is at a loss of what to do. How do we react when health and safety communication is piecemeal, when fossil fuel executives and lobbyists have robbed my kids of clean air?

My toddler craves nature. My seven-year-old, who has lived much of his life with the threat of catching COVID-19 in public indoor spaces, must now contend with the outdoors, too. How can I deny them what summer is all about? Isn't indoor air often worse than polluted outdoor air? What happens when our parental instincts are unmoored by the climate crisis?

I feel guilt for not anticipating this reality. I've had the privilege of having a home in a city that has yet to see the devastating consequences of our climate emergency like so many around the world.

I wish my children had the free and messy outdoor summers we had. They deserve it; all children do.

But as climate scientists predict that extreme weather events like wildfires will continue to invade our lungs all summer, we must adapt to safely live with them whether we want to or not.

I just can't help but wonder what else we are losing when summer — the season of skinned knees, ice cream beards and bedtimes under the stars — becomes a season of staying inside on high alert?

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Magdalena Olszanowski is a Polish-born writer, artist and professor in Montreal. She received her PhD in communication studies from Concordia University. Her work can be found in Esse, n+1 and Visual Communication Quarterly among others. She is working on a novel set in 1980s communist Poland.