fog alerts

(friends, and the joy of obsession)

It’s early on an autumnal morning. I’m standing sleepy-eyed in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. My phone buzzes.

‘Fog alert!’ reads a message from a friend, ‘Up on the hill.’

‘Fog out there,’ comes another — this one from my husband, who has already left for work — ‘it’s pretty thick’.

Earlier this week, as I stirred the porridge, my husband sent me simply the word ‘FOG’. To me, these messages from him are expressions of love.

If a fog alert comes in, my morning becomes a whirl. Once I’ve helped the smallest to find his shoes, I run upstairs for my camera and tripod, ready to dash to the woods as soon as he has been safely delivered to school. Photographing fog is my passion, chasing it is my obsession.

On this particular morning, by the time I get to the woods the heavy fog has begun to sink down into the valley, where it covers my town, but there are still plenty of foggy tendrils woven between the trees. I meet a friend on the edge of the field, walking her dogs: ‘it’s beautiful that way’, she tells me. I follow the tunnel of the lower path, where beech leaves hang in feathery drapes, to find that the falling fog has gathered at the bottom of the woods.

My friends understand that I love fog. One by one, I have pulled them into my odd obsession. They are aware that if fog drops, I might hurry away from the cafe, coffee half-drunk, to go in search of it. Passing me after school drop off, as fog begins to curl around the town, they don’t need to ask why I am hurrying away. They know that — to me — a foggy morning is far more precious than a sparkling sunny one.

In autumn, when the messages arrive on my phone, I see the words ‘fog alert’, but I hear: ‘I thought of you’. I hear: ‘I see the world in the way that you do’.

A fog alert tells me someone is thinking of me. It also tells me that there is magic out there and I’m not alone in choosing to see it. Fog may seem nothing more than an inconvenience, but I see it as a transformation, an invitation — something to wonder at, and to share.

It all comes back — as it so often does with me — to Mary Oliver:

‘Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it .’

(and if you notice that it’s foggy, do send a fog alert!)

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

book

instagram