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| Fog Series by Stephen Cummings CC-BY 2.0 |
At ground level and walking pace, the cloudy mist left a
cool dampness on my bare arms and shrouded the buildings across the river with
a filtered light that briefly made one question the existence of actual bricks
and glass. The scene from our sixth-floor office windows presented a virtual
late-summer snowscape, nothing but white visible when looking out over the
city.
Growing up, my mom drove us to school, which took us past
her campus-style corporate complex. Her offices sat back from the road enough
that on foggy mornings like today the buildings would be indiscernible.
Sometimes, the closest structure would loom out of the haze just as we passed
by, a sudden presence on the left side of the road. We would joke that if Mom
couldn’t see her office, she didn’t really have to go to work that day,
although that never seemed to serve as a good excuse to get us out of school on
the same mornings.
Two and a half decades later, I found myself in downtown
Cincinnati, early for a morning meeting and craving a caffeine fix. Walking
through Lytle Park, the same fog that hid office buildings in my childhood was
cloaking the skyscrapers and historic walkups of my new city. All at once, the
rising sun behind me found a chink in the low-lying clouds and illuminated the
towers with an unearthly golden-pink glow that cannot be adequately described. The
waning stillness of the awakening city, the detailed permanence of the
architecture around me, the moistness of morning mist, and this vibrant peachy
glow filled me with an awe typically reserved for a mountain vista and
reassured me that I do, at times, love a city.
Do you have any strong memories of foggy days? Were you in a city, on a beach, or out in wilderness? What is the best description of fog you have seen or heard? How would you use the written word to paint a picture of a heavy fog? Share your ideas in the comments.
