CLEVELAND, Ohio—At the back of my laundry room cupboard, there’s a blue plastic Heinen’s bag stuffed full of masks. They’ve been there a while; untouched since the day I decided we didn’t need them anymore. I’m not even sure I remember when that was. I have already forgotten.

What I do know is that up until then I had masks everywhere. In the car. In my bag. A Ziploc with a week’s worth of clean masks went in each child’s backpack every day to school. Baskets of clean masks sat at the ready on the table in the hall, ready to grab on the way out the door. And I kept a basket for dirty masks in the laundry room that needed to be washed. On the sanitary cycle. With bleach.

When I think back on it, it was a little crazy how quickly we went from a world where most of us had never worn a mask, to one where some crafty and entrepreneurial moms I knew had made a side business sewing them and selling them on Facebook.

People swapped patterns. They made and sold lanyards for them. Businesses gave away masks with logos instead of water bottles or t-shirts. My daughter even had special masks made to match her dance costumes. We had masks with bling, masks with holiday themes, masks with Disney characters, and some I bought at Target simply because I thought they were pretty. At one point we even got matching masks for the Brownie troop. Masks became a part of life.

As a society, we took these once strange, foreign and uncomfortable objects, and in a very short time not only accepted them, but turned them into fashion accessories, advertising platforms, and political statements. And we did it because we needed them to keep ourselves and our families safe.

Until one day we didn’t.

I haven’t given my bag of masks too much thought in a long time. But last week as the smoke poured over Cleveland from Canada and turned the sun a hazy orange, I thought of masks once again when the doctors I spoke with advised that people with heart and lung conditions wear a well-fitted N95 mask if they planned to be outdoors.

Cloth masks said the experts, while effective at reducing the transmission of COVID-19 by trapping the potentially virus containing respiratory droplets from our mouths and noses inside the masks, would not do the trick when it came to filtering out the tiny, chemical-laden smoke particles that could make their way into our airways and bloodstream and do all kinds of damage. For that, only an N95 mask (which filters out particles larger than 0.3 microns) would do. And then, only one that fit snugly up against the face would be adequate, since air coming in around any gaps would not be filtered and defeat the purpose of wearing it.

Although my own lungs are healthy, during the worst of the smoke my head ached, my chest felt tight and my throat slightly scratchy. Exposure to smoke could increase one’s susceptibility to illness — even COVID-19 infection, I had been told. I began to wonder where I had put the boxes of N95 masks, and if they would be fitted enough to be effective. Should I purchase something effective for wildfire smoke to have on hand in case it became necessary?

After all, the planet is warming. Forest fires are increasing. This is likely to happen again. Maybe even this summer. We’re not even half-way through July, and as summers go, it’s barely even been hot yet!

Here we go again, I thought. We will never be free of masks.

Amid these thoughts, I tried to remember a time before masks. I tried to remember those days of blissful ignorance when N95 meant absolutely nothing to me. When nobody outside of specialists or certain tradespeople even knew what an N95 mask was, much less where to buy one. Remember when you had never even owned a mask of any kind, much less had bags and boxes of them stuffed into drawers and cupboards just in case we might need them again?

Me neither.

“Someday our grandchildren and great grandchildren are going to find bags of these masks in our cupboards and drawers and ask us what they are,” I recall joking to a friend when deciding what to do with all my accumulated masks. Should I keep them? Throw them out? I spent a lot of money on them, after all.

“Grandma, what are these things and why do you have so many, and in so many different colors and styles?” I imagined them asking. “Oh these?” I would tell them. “These are masks from the great pandemic! We wore them everywhere so we wouldn’t get sick, and so we had masks for every different sort of occasion.”

I would show them the scratchy, ill-fitting tie-on masks that a friend made before we knew better. The plain boring blue ones my mom made my kids and me from a special antimicrobial fabric that claimed to kill viruses on contact. The one with ballet dancers someone in my adult ballet class made for our whole group, the fleece ones with pretty floral patterns made by a friend, the character-themed ones Santa put in stockings Christmas of 2020, and the sparkly Irish-themed masks we wore to Irish dance and on St. Patrick’s Day.

In the end, I suppose I couldn’t quite bring myself to just throw them away. I’m not sure if I felt attached to them, or just a practical need to be prepared for the next possible deadly virus. If enough time passed, maybe I would make them into a quilt. There has to be a Pinterest board with creatives ideas for used cloth masks. No?

But looking at them all now, I’m glad I saved them. To me they tell a story of a time that was marked by change. A time when we stayed isolated indoors and taught our children to sing happy birthday twice to wash their hands, when toilet paper and Clorox wipes could not be found, plexiglass separated school desks and restaurants booths, and companies had to come up with new sources of alcohol to meet the unprecedented demand for hand sanitizer.

They are also a reminder to me that despite having to give up a lot during the COVID-19 years, we eventually found a way to do things. To come together in our communities and help each other. We found a way to remain connected to school, work, families and activities — and we did it primarily because we wore masks.

As COVID-19 cases waned, I remember the first time I dared take off my mask in a public place. I walked into the grocery store and my face felt completely naked. It felt like I was doing something wrong. How strange it was to realize that I had actually become more comfortable in public with a mask than without one.

That feeling faded quickly. Today I enjoy seeing people smile again. I love the sun and the wind on my face. I love not having to wear or wash masks all the time, and I especially like not finding them all over the house like dirty socks.

Will we ever raise a generation of children again who have nothing but blank stares when asked about masks, N95 or otherwise? Will we ever really be free of them? I confess, it feels to me like the world has shifted, and masks, for better or worse, are here to stay. I predict that most of us who have endured the pandemic will be grateful not to wear them, but also willing to cover our faces if asked to do so in the future with minimum complaint.

I further suspect seeing a masked stranger in the grocery store will never generate stares and questions the way it once did. And I am certain that N95 is forever a part of my lexicon.

I hope that future generations get to live a life free of masks. I hope that I get to tell my grandchildren and great grandchildren stories of the masks we wore to protect us from smoke from forest fires and the great pandemic because they are things that they never had to experience for themselves.

And I hope that when I do, they’ll look at me with eyes full of wonder and awe and say “Grandma, I don’t believe you!”

In which case, I’ll just have to pull out the bag of masks in the cupboard to prove it.