The fog is impressive where we live, but it's been truly amazing where I work, which is right next to the ocean on top of a bluff so that the fog is thicker than ... well, pea soup, to use the old cliche. I find the fog kind of creepy -- the range of vision is so low that it feels like things loom up at you suddenly. Which means that driving around daycare centres and schools is especially fun -- which I do everyday, after all, dropping off my kiddo.
On the other hand, the dampening of the noise with the fog and the way the fog dissipates the light, especially at dusk, is really lovely. It makes the everyday things you see seem just a little different, and sometimes a second look is all you need to appreciate the little beauties that are all around you all the time, that you just don't take the time to notice.
The other day at dusk I was driving along, and from behind a street light pole came an arresting red glow. It was only the glow of a traffic light from beyond it, and it only lasted a second, but I've never before thought that traffic lights could be pretty. And I kind of like having my perspective changed by something as simple as fog.
* Did you know that this is a title of a book by the same author who writes the Max and Ruby series? Only it's a book for young adults and addresses some pretty serious issues, such as mental health and suicide. A long way from Max and Ruby and their adventures.
**Yes, I pretty much AM obsessed with weather, thanks for asking. I blame my father, who can recite weather statistics from the past fifty years off the top of his head. There's only so many conversations you can have about weather before actually becoming interested, or at least convinced that this is a topic worthy of discussion. I blame his profession as an astronomer for that, because he only gets to do what he loves when the weather is nice. Plus, you know, he's a man of science and statistics are just fun.
1 comment:
Oh, fog! I love fog!
We had a foggy day recently -- I can't remember when exactly, but a few days after we got a lot of snow, the temperature suddenly rose and the snow turned straight into fog. And the experience of walking down the street into it after dropping SP off from school turned into this bit from chapter 3 of the WiP:
. . .
When I got up on Friday morning, the view from my bedroom window was of the inside of a cloud – exactly like flying through one in a plane. From the kitchen windows we could see about halfway to the back fence; when I closed the front gate and stood on the sidewalk, I couldn’t see the end of the block in either direction. The air was warmer than it had been for weeks; a lot of the snow must have melted overnight, because pretty much every square inch of sidewalk that wasn’t covered in ice was under water, but now it wasn’t so much melting as … what’s the word for going straight from solid to gas without passing through the liquid state? Sublimating, that’s it. The snowbanks were sublimating straight into waves of fog.
When I was little, I loved fog. It made the world look unfamiliar and mysterious, as though all sorts of fantastic things might be waiting just over there – as though the Kings and Queens of Narnia or King Arthur and his knights or, who knows, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise might emerge from the mist when you least expected it.
Which was exactly the problem that morning: the fog looked just as unfamiliar and mysterious as it ever had, but the things I could imagine lurking in it were a hell of a lot less appealing.
Sorrel didn’t seem to like it much, either. “I knew I was afraid of outside,” she said in a small voice, standing very close to me on the sidewalk and hunching into the ten-year-old ski jacket she’d dug out of the back of the hall closet. “I just didn’t realize it was a rational fear.”
. . .
Which may very well end up on the cutting-room floor, but at the moment I quite like it :)
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