What is your favorite season of year? Why?

This is an easy one. Winter.

I have a few reasons for that obviously. First, it’s the fact that no matter how cold it is, you can add more layers. However, you can’t take away more layers than you legally can. There’s only so far you can get stripped down to cool. This means my power bill actually goes down and I’m a lot more comfortable even if it does cause my pain to spike a fair bit. It’s a good trade for me.

Next, there’s the current situation with Canada in the for fires. Highest numbers since 2023 when the world saw Canada burn. It affected multiple countries to smoke. And we had multiple countries sending in help. This year we’re already breaking records and to me, that’s scary. What’s worse I know it’ll get worse.

You see the smoke isn’t as heavy as it has been in past years, despite being off the charts AQI rating of 10+. It affects many of those I love and myself because for me, my family the migraines that I get are genetic. Every last one of them is having issues. I’ve got friends who don’t even normally get headaches and they’re going into multiple day long ones now.

Then factor in lung conditions. You see I’m an asthmatic and again it’s genetic comes down through my paternal and maternal genetically and my adoptive father has it so all of my siblings have it. I have other family members with COPD. And then there are the elders out at the reservations here that we’re going to lose, if we’re not extremely careful and we can’t afford to lose more of that knowledge. And all elders, have knowledge to share doesn’t matter who they are or their genetic background.

For some reason, this fire season actually has me on edge. I’ve seen worse, I’ve responded to worse. I am a front line 1st responder in the medical field. Sure I’m retired now because of a car accident, but it doesn’t change the fact that I still have that training and I still utilize it.

I don’t panic until after things settle down because for me that ability to hyper focus as an individual with the neural divergence I have is a blessing. It has saved life, it has saved my life, it has saved others as well. So I quite literally don’t panic because there’s no space in my brain for panic to enter. Once my brain stops going from 1000 to 100,000 and come down and stay his back down. I’m in crisis mode. This triggers two interesting things with me one being the extreme hyper focus where Autism and ADHD have combined so my brain is going rapidly through all of the training I’ve taken and all the knowledge I have.

The second I get eidetic memory of anything relating to that crisis though the second one does have me wondering if to fit in, I didn’t actually damage that photographic memory and can only utilize it in certain situations. It is a blessing to have this because I can maintain a multiple casualty scenario in the lead position and ensure every person is cared for. I still remember patients that I treated as a first aider in junior high. Which is what gave me the clue about having a photographic memory to be honest.

Yet here I am worried because my own province has once again declared a state of emergency along with other provinces.

We’re getting help internationally, so far US and Australia. Yet we’re at a code five which is the highest you can get for disaster. The scariest part is that Edmonton has had two evacuation orders not just Alerts orders back in May. We haven’t seen the peak of fire season yet. It hurt hurts to breathe, my throat is so sore, and my eyes are watering so bad it’s not funny. I will admit that some of those tears are for those who have been lost and for those firemen who were stranded with a shelter in place order who had to raid stores nearby for food when their rations ran out. They were rescued thankfully yet it just tells me how bad things are.

To me an easy way to deal with this would be to create fire brakes. This will stop a fire from spreading and allow easier access to all sides of the fire.. the snow is the biggest reason I love winter. There are no fires and if they are, they don’t last long and you’re lucky to even know of that.

So yeah, winter is my season sure causes me pain but at least I can breathe. I think I would rather breathe. I don’t know about you.