“After much wandering and search they found a way that they could climb, and with a last hundred feet of clawing scramble they were up. They came to a cleft between two dark crags, and passing through found themselves on the very edge of the last fence of Mordor. Below them, at the bottom of a fall of some fifteen hundred feet, lay the inner plain stretching away into a formless gloom beyond their sight. The wind of the world blew now from the West, and the great clouds were lifted high, floating away eastward; but still only a grey light came to the dreary fields of Gorgoroth. There smokes trailed on the ground and lurked in hollows, and fumes leaked from fissures in the earth.”
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
The nooks and crannies of the Farm have been beset by all-day ground fogs the last few days.  Ground fog rises from the earth as if steam from a boiling kettle, but there is no fire to sustain it. It is too cold and dreary, as it is January in Humptulips County.
This morning’s pervasive fog is of a different nature.  It does not derive from the river, despite our nearness. Instead, it has descended from the sky. It may be, for all I can see, a lowered sky come to kiss the earth and declare its love. Up close, the fog is loose rather than dense; I can see for a hundred yards or so before it acquires enough opacity to block my vision. Were I to go walking, it would be as if I were within a mobile tent of grey moisture moving with me everywhere on the Farm. Where it ends, I cannot tell. It usually gives out a mile or so from the Farm, but from my library windows it appears to be the endless stuff of existence.
This morning’s fog is of the confluence of heaven and earth; the ground fogs that have persisted throughout our January days spring only from the earth. They hug the hollows and wet places from which they emerge, reminding us that these are places of mystery. Are they poisonous places where earth spews its bile, or sporadically appearing entryways into places of enchantment ? I cannot be certain, but find the latter to be much more agreeable in these drear days.  This is a time when a sense of mystery is all that matters; a time when all of the answers which you may conceive beg any question you might take the time to formulate.
On our first trip to England many years ago, we stayed in the Cotswolds in a little hamlet called Buckland. Being an avid fan of Tolkien, I was struck by the name and looked carefully for Hobbits or any hint of The Shire. I saw neither Oldbucks nor Brandybucks no matter how carefully I looked, and there was nothing nearby that resembled the village of Bree – but The Shire seemed all around us nonetheless.  Tolkien did use Cotswold and Oxford area names in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as we discovered one evening listening to the BBC while in residence at Buckland, and I wondered then if he had ever visited our small hamlet. Indeed, the rehabilitated flour mill in which we stayed for two weeks could have graced a Tolkien story, and might well have been the inspiration for The Prancing Pony. At least, I prefer to believe so and care not to be discouraged in my belief.
January is a time for enchantment: the weather keeps us close to home and fuels our imagination, while the library at the center of our home sends us to far away places real and imagined.  Only in January can the here and there of ground fogs become entryways into differing magic realms – entryways which beg to be opened if only we can find and interpret the magic runes written thereon or nearby. The weather has been too poor for me to explore their possibilities on the ground, and, in any event, my imagination would not care to be disappointed. But from here – from the windows of our library, from the very center of our home – their mystery serves my purposes all too well.
Excellent discourse on the Northwest “ground fog”.