When I was little, driving toward downtown Houston on 59 or 45 meant watching the city come into view against a blue sky.
That’s the picture I remember.
The buildings in the distance, the sky behind them.
The city in the sky.
These days, I find myself looking at the space around those buildings. I notice a low layer of haze stretching across the view… Sometimes the change in height as I go over an overpass makes it especially noticeable.
Since traffic and everyday life picked back up after the COVID lockdowns, that view has been on my mind more. I look at it and wonder what I’ve been breathing all these years. Then I think about the children growing up here now.
What will their version of this memory look like?
A Familiar View, an Unfamiliar Question
My memory cannot give me a pollution reading. Neither can a look out of the car window. Establishing how Houston’s air has changed would take actual measurements over time, and a hazy view cannot tell me exactly what’s in it.
But that feeling of recognition matters to me.
A story about air quality lands differently when I can attach it to the freeway I’ve driven on and the skyline I’ve been looking at since childhood.
Reading about possible connections between air pollution and brain health brought that feeling into focus.
An NIH research overview describes a study in which greater exposure to fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, was associated with more cases of dementia developing over time. The researchers also examined different sources of those particles and well…
the findings add to questions about how the air around us may affect health beyond the lungs.
Read the NIH overview.
That research does not tell me what has happened inside my own body.
An association in a population cannot supply an individual diagnosis or prove that a particular exposure caused a person’s illness, I’m not paranoid and neither should you be.
It does give me, and hopefully you, another reason to pay attention.
The Place We Grow Ip Becomes Part of the Question
When I think about growing up in Houston, air quality now sits alongside those familiar images of roads and buildings. I wonder about the years I’ve already spent here and the years ahead for people who are just being born.
There is something unsettling about realizing that a place can feel completely familiar while you still have questions about something as basic as its air.
I want to keep room for both the memory and the evidence.
The memory explains why I care. The measurements and
research are what can help answer the questions it raises.
For me, that is the useful starting point:
noticing the place I live in, being honest about what I can see, and
getting curious about what I still need to understand.
I remember a city in the sky.
Now I find myself thinking about everything in the air between us.
