The day the sky turned orange, I did not respond well. But who among us did? There was something about the hellfire glow caused by the California wildfires that covered the Bay Area on Wednesday, Sept. 9, that prompted many of us to indulge our worst kinds of fears to process the 10th infernal circle we’d been plunged into.

And the year had been goingsowell before that.

But even as the sky seemed to befalling in ashy particles,I was reminded of what we still had to be grateful for — namely, the things we can’t buy. Of all things, the apocalyptic view reminded me of the lyrics to an Irving Berlin song: “Got no mansion, got no yacht, still I’mhappy for what I’ve got. I’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.” (Unfortunately, we had neither the sun nor moon that Wednesday, and I was hoping for their return soon.)

In a year that has taken so much from so many — homes, jobs, social occasions, traditions and, worst of all, lives — I was still shocked that 2020 had managed to steal something as indelible as the sky. Looking at it that day, which has been described as reminiscent of science fiction films like “Blade Runner” and the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, my eyes ached. For a few minutes, I fixated on the possibility that we might not get normal blue (or more likely gray) skies back for a long time. What if we never got them back? I worried that orange or red, or some other furious-colored horizon, would become our new normal, just asmasks, hand sanitizers and socialdistancing have become something we’re used to during the pandemic.

In the weeks before Orange Wednesday, with fires raging around the state, our air quality had become so bad on some days that we couldn’t go outside for walks or even open our windows. First we are denied air, now the sky, further restricting our already limited COVID coping mechanisms. In this hellish year, the sky was now in perfect aesthetic agreement with how many of us felt about 2020.

Still, somehow in my downward associative spiral, I latched onto a realization: The next time I see a sky that isn’t thick with smoke or the color of rage, I won’t take it for granted.

The past five months have had such a high concentration of tragedies, bad news and world-changing events that the orange sky became an exercise in extreme gratitude. With every fixture of our daily “normal” lives that we’ve lost, both temporarily and permanently, in a morbid way we were being reminded to appreciate even the smallest, seemingly most insignificant moments of comfort and beauty still available.

I’ve never been a fan of publicizing your gratitude list. It can inadvertently function as a form of backdoor bragging. But right now, it feels vital for our mental health that we acknowledge what we are grateful for at the most basic level.

周四当我醒来的时候,天空是一个温和sepia-yellow hue over a thick gray fog. It wasn’t great, but it was an improvement over Orange Wednesday. By Friday the smoke-fog was thick in San Francisco, but it wasn’t orange. I was happy to see the improvement, but more than anything, I was just thankful I woke up that morning.