Yesterday was foggy.
When I was a child, foggy days in winter were the worst. You woke up in the morning and you knew that by the end of the day the white wonderland of the midwest would have dripped itself into a muddy, grey oblivion. Fog meant that everything was melting and the air was thick of a damp that the warmest mittens couldn’t hold out against.
Yesterday, of course, I was busy. I knew it was foggy, and it was irritating in the I-have-to-drive-home-in-this-goo, Why-can’t-it-just-be-sunny way, but I didn’t dwell on its impact on the 14-16 inches of snow lying about, since there’s not as much to celebrate with snow as an adult. (Pros: potential snow day – Cons: shoveling, plowing, ice on your car, ice on the roads, maniac drivers, snowbanks you can’t see around, driving in mittens, fewer parking spots because the snow takes up room – you get the point.) I thought briefly of how much more disappointed I would have been if this had been my childhood, all the snow melting away right before Christmas, but in my grinch-like whirlwind, I didn’t really think further than that.
But then, this morning, on the way to work – a miracle! It had become cold overnight, and all the fog had frozen on the trees, so that everything was sparkly and white.
I thought of grief. In the winter, fog is dank and depressing and overwhelming, but when the fog lifts and freezes and sparkles, while we still don’t understand why we had to come through the fog, we can see how the other side is all the more beautiful for it.
Maybe this doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but that’s my deep thought for today.
Loves to all.
