The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Carl Sandburg, Fog
Yesterday dawned as if it would become a beautiful day – as it eventually did. When, at dawn, I glanced to the east while returning to the library with coffee in hand, I saw fields bathed in the early wan sunlight that is the hallmark of a cloudless late winter’s day. The fields were blessed with wispy highlights of frost as if fresh from a trip to a cosmic beauty parlor, the overnight temperature not having dipped low enough to render them completely white.
When I looked west from the library, however, I noticed that the trees defining my horizons seemed to be in the process of transformation – those in the front rank were recognizably trees complete in every detail, while those in the rear were dissolving into abstractions. And as I continued to watch, the front ranks began dissolving as well. It was if I was watching the fine, swift, dizzying brushwork of an accomplished water-color artist creating an impression of a horizon, an impression meant to serve as background in a painting to be entitled “A Winter’s Dawn.”
It was if I was watching the hand of God at work.
The transformation soon revealed itself as the work of weather, not of God. A fog bank crept cautiously from the trees into my neighbor’s fields as if something there might offer it challenge. For all of its caution, its approach had the implacability, the inevitability of a stalking ocean squall; it soon engulfed the house and then our eastern fields, the speed of its passage measured by the limbs of the cedar outside the large library windows as they turned from green to gray to mist and back again within a matter of several minutes.
I wonder where the fog was going, and whether the means of its travel was an accident of science or a matter of will; I wonder at the timing and the manner of its eventual dispersal or if it has shape and substance still. All I know with certainty is that I was captivated by the magic of its passage, taken by surprise as if a pawn captured en passant.
