I miss the fog

My friend Jeanne is a great artist and a wonderful photographer. She recently posted this photo of her morning awakening at a camp on Crescent Lake, Maine. What a gorgeous photo, and it truly captures what Maine in summer is all about. Loons, a quiet lake, fishing, quiet putt-putts as the sun rises. And fog.

I never thought much about fog. On my last trip several years ago to Lubec, I tried to photograph fog and learned about light bouncing everywhere but where you want it ... but I realized after seeing Jeanne's picture, that I miss the old fog. And foghorns.

On a Georgia summer morning we may get some fog for short periods as the warm ground meets the briefly cool air. But that is just temporary fog, not the earth-to-sky, enveloping, dripping, getting lost kind of fog. The kind of fog I see mostly is on the way to work in the morning, like this:














On that trip to Lubec Maine, I was working one sunny morning at the table by the bay window of the cottage I'd rented by the Cove. I looked up some minutes later to see:












The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on...

[Fog, by Carl Sandburg]

The fog had come in like that, silently, on cat feet, and continued coming in until even the near boats at moorings were obscured. I smiled, basking in the wonder that is a foggy day in Maine, never thinking that I was taking it for granted, and that little cat feet of fog did not exist everywhere.