Toxic.

The ash falls gently like snowflakes, covering the ground at my feet with a blanket of grey. This blanket consists of a mother’s rocking chair, an accountant’s business, a boy’s favorite backyard tree, the newlyweds’ first home, a traveler’s hotel room, and the portraits on the mantel in a grandma’s house.

Fires in Yorba Linda and Brea, Calif. spew the remains of hopes and dreams miles into the air and the winds blow them across city blocks and shopping malls, onto the university campus where I work and study and play. I breathe the ash – it coats my lungs with destruction – and remember life is not about grades or resumes or promotions.

Strange how one day of upheaval can bring reality back into focus.

Nauseating.

The smoke billows around my head and fumes from lighter fluid choke me. I step back to wipe my tear-filled eyes and cough out the irritant from my lungs. Efraim and I are barbequing kabob and chicken wings for youth camping in the wilderness of Yehudiah. I love serving the kids but hate how my face swells and my nose drips and my eyes water while the meat grills. High winds threaten the fire, so I fan the flames, getting smokier minute by minute.

That night under the Israeli stars, I slide into my sleeping bag and sniff. My nose wrinkles in disapproval and vents a sneeze. Despite a shower and pajamas, I still reek of lighter fluid and kabob.

Funny how obeying God can smell so weird.

Dreadful.

I set the book aside, seething anger, having just witnessed the systematic incineration of my ancestors in Nazi Germany. Elie Wiesel’s “Night” leads me into the concentration camp, forces me to watch the torment, to capture the flames, to weep for my family. The nightmare of hate can strip a people of livelihood, dignity and identity, immersing them in smoke and killing their souls.

The man writes of children’s bodies transformed into smoke under a silent sky. He chronicles a violinist’s extinguished future, a God who writhed on the gallows with a boy. His haunting memories must dance lively and dwell lurking in our minds, Wiesel says, “Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. . . . And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. . . . Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

Bizarre how surviving a holocaust can change public opinion.

Polluting.

The waves of heat jiggle my view of puffy clouds in the blue sky. Flames crackle lustfully, and smoke finally emerges through the smoke stack atop George Tiller’s abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. I catch a whiff of the scent – it’s not charred trash. The sweetness gags me. It’s flesh. Burning.

Grey and white flecks emerge from the incinerator, fluttering to the grass around me. I stand mesmerized, horrified. Tears splash from my eyes in shame at the unbearable atrocity happening in my own hometown. I look down and notice a piece of ash about 1.5 inches by 2 inches lays on the sidewalk only millimeters away from my left shoe. My body bends impulsively, instinctively. The ash is between my fingers. Yet this is not ash. I know ash; I burned it almost every week for six years in a barrel outside my family’s country home. It’s got a gritty feel and is powdery. But this is soft and feels like ski-

Skin. No! Everything within me rebels at the thought. I hold the grey fragment closer for visual inspection: tiny lines of cellular structure. Moments ago this was indeed the soft, smooth skin of an unborn baby.

My vomit barely makes it off the sidewalk. Yet purging my churning stomach does not relieve my reeling mind. The scent of burning lingers effectively. The contamination engulfs my soul every time I see smoke.

Curious how a touch of skin to skin can turn the world around.

“He who has seen the vision of his city upside-down has seen it the right way up.” G.K. Chesterton