Woke to a dense fog this morning. Winter disappearing. There is no snow left on the ground. The freeze on the pond has become mist, all but the thinnest layer. The air hanging thickly above the yard is full of what was cold and white. It is a very different fog then the one that rolled in from the sea when we lived in San Francisco. There, so near the ocean, it billowed in morning and evening. Engulfing one street at a time. Some days there would be a fog so thick in the front of the house that you couldn’t see the house just across the way, but the backyard would be clear with a patch of sunlight. At my friend’s house up and over the hill in the Mission it would be sunny and ten degrees warmer. Here, in the hills of southern Indiana there is nothing rolling in, rather the land is rising up. We are suspended in a cloud that is the earth and sky meeting at this change of seasons.
I often wonder how much bearing living in one place or another has on the trajectory of our lives. How different would my life be if I had stayed in New York, or Spain, or San Francisco instead of settling into the southern mid west? I look out into a scape of trees and fields slowly revealing line and shape as the sky becomes sky again. Is it only the differences of mist or would the ground itself shift the way I spend my days?
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