Ground Fog

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Mark
(Posted July 15, 2010)
It’s been humid all day. When I got off work and drove home, even though the temperature on my car’s thermometer read in the high seventies, it felt warmer because the air was so damn heavy. Weighty, would be the word. The atmosphere of NE Minnesota was weighty; pregnant with rain. Another adjective one could use to describe the atmosphere would be a word that calls to mind the Indian subcontinent: muggy.As I sit on the covered front porch of our house along the Cloquet River, it begins. I hear the distant descent of water from the sky as a subtle echo. I watch storm breach the treeline at the far edge of our pasture where the hay is beginning to yellow. The pitter-patter increases in cadence as the weather moves towards me. I sit beneath the protective overhang of our front porch on a swing, book in hand, studying the storm. Then the sky opens up.

But the rain doesn’t lessen the mugginess. Doesn’t reduce the thick, clammy grip of the portending storm. Thunder crashes. I see no lightening. Birds flee the onslaught, flitting towards the sanctuary of the woods. I return to my book, a non-fiction study of the Forest Brothers, Partisan Estonians who fought the U.S.S.R. for the better part of a decade following WWII. The book is well written. The writer, capable. But the words don’t hold my attention. The ponderous weather has me thinking about another book I’m reading. City of Joy. Maybe you saw the movie when it came out a few decades ago. The story is set in the impoverished slums of Calcutta and chronicles a Christian missionary’s journey into abject poverty. I’m only a few chapters into the book but the imagery, the writing, the characters, well, they’ve latched onto me in such a fashion that the mere presence of humidity carries me away to that slum; a place of decay and indescribable hardship I’ve only visited through words.

I watch the storm push east. Last drops fall into the calm waters of my wife’s garden pond. Thick ground fog ascends from sodden earth and cloaks the surrounding woods in gray. I look across the open field, surveying all that I’ve been blessed with and I know that I’m a lucky man.

Peace.

Mark

About Mark

I'm a reformed lawyer and author.
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