The week my town's air cleared up and I could actually see the mountains

Back in 2020 there was this stretch in September where the smoke from the wildfires up north blew in so thick that you couldn't see the hills two miles out. I remember checking the AQI one morning and it read 412, which is past the top of the scale, and our little hardware store in Medford sold out of N95 masks in a single afternoon. My neighbor Dana taped a furnace filter to a box fan and ran four of them in her living room, and honestly half the street copied her by Wednesday. Then a cold front pushed through on a Thursday night and by Friday the sky was that deep blue you forget exists, and I stood in my driveway just staring at the Siskiyous like they'd been gone for a decade. It hit me that week how much cleaner air used to be the normal thing, not the special event. I started walking my kid to school instead of driving that fall, partly for the exercise but mostly because I wanted to keep noticing. Does anyone else remember a specific week where the air got so bad it changed how you think about your daily drive?