Foggy Mornings

I, for one, am in love with foggy mornings.  While I enjoy super dense fog on occasion, the kind that is as thick as pea soup and leaves every surface covered in condensation, the fog I love more is the spotty fog that accumulates in little valleys and above rivers.  Early in the morning with the sun just starting to show itself over distant tree tops is perhaps my favorite time for spotty fog.   When I see a distant hillside robed in fog, little wisps escaping upwards, I want to follow that fog and immerse myself in it.  Its almost as if the fog is hiding a host of secrets within its all encompassing embrace.  It speaks of mystery and hidden treasures, beckoning one towards it with its ethereal glow.  I rarely succumb to its pull unfortunately.  I don't follow the fog, don't pull over when I am in its embrace, and don't go searching for its hidden secrets.  I merely drive through it, waiting to be captured by a band of roving gypsies or a group of roving bandits on horseback.  They never come either, despite how much I might wish they did.  If I ignore the power lines, street lights, and the occasional blaring of a car horn, I can almost imagine myself elsewhere, far from the pull of work and the intrusion of people into my life.  Visions of the tantalizing fog speak to covered mountaintops in the Swiss Alps or sometimes just the rolling hills of the California coast.  Those distant settings are transported wherever the fog goes, or wherever my mind wanders on a given morning.  Driving to work through the fog sometimes makes me wish I was driving the coast in California, searching for that one hilltop that escapes the fogs intrusive reach.  What could be more wonderful than finding that hilltop, parking your car, and getting out to see a blanket of endless white stretching out before you.  At times it almost looks like a tsunami in super slow motion, its undulating waves roaring silently in to every crevice and corner.  Its as if the fog is creeping in to clean and scrub every surface it comes into contact with.  Despite how much fog there may be, it never stays forever.  Rather, it is a fleeting friend come to visit early in the morning.  Its quiet and seductive, deadening any sound uttered within its grasp, teaching us to just listen sometimes.   I always listen to what the fog has to say and often times it says nothing, but in all its silence, it says everything.  It beckons us to see the quiet side of nature, the rest that nature gets within the fog's embrace, its life giving droplets of moisture saturating everything.  Perhaps we could all use a little cleansing fog sometimes to scrub off the worries of the world.  Perhaps we should venture out more often on foot, exploring a landscape transformed into one where a masked marauder could be hiding behind any tree.  But, alas, time is fleeting and we never truly know when fog will make its appearance, it just does.   The next time I see some fog, I will find its resting place and allow it to embrace me for a while, cleaning me, maybe, of the crap that fills my brain.