The Fog

I’m not sure I’ve seen the sun once in the last five days. It’s been raining, then misting, then the ground was covered with fog and the streetlights had this mysterious halo around them and everything looked like it had been smudged. But no sun. The biting cold has finally abated, but it’s out exactly warm. It IS winter, even though it’s Texas.

And you can tell—there’s a restlessness, a tiredness, even when you haven’t done anything. The days are short and the nights are long, but they blur together. There’s no big heraldic sunrise, no triumphant orange sunset. The black becomes gray, becomes a kind of grayish white like putty, then becomes silver. You know what it’s like to walk or drive through a cloud—wet to the skin, nothing in front of you, nothing behind you. You have to really know where you’re going.

Luckily, or providentially, the kids and I are talking about weather right now in third grade, so we got to discuss the seasons and why they are the way they are. “How many of you drove through fog this morning?” Most hands went up. “That’s what it’s like to be inside a cloud!” They were impressed. 

“I know you guys are tired of being inside,” I consoled. “I get it…”

Clouds and mist change the landscape. They blunt the edges, they show the green bright as emeralds. And Texas isn’t like this, usually. It feels like Ireland—I’ve been thinking a lot about the week I spent over there, always bundled up in a water-shedding jacket. We’re famous for our prairie sky (it’s wide and high). It doesn’t feel like that—it feels like a white wool blanket, sagging down like Andrew’s blanket fort.

Yesterday, a kid turned to me, in the middle of class, and said, “that’s a weird-sounding bird.”

Yes, there it was—the high-up, far-off nasal cry of a nighthawk. “It’s a nighthawk,” I told her. “You only hear them at dawn and dusk…or when it’s been cloudy for a while.”

“Wait, a ‘nighthawk’ is a thing?” She asked, incredulous. Maybe it sounded a lot like a superhero—I mean, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, according to my husband.

A few weeks ago, on a particularly cold, dark day, I recited a poem for them—it was short, and they hadn’t heard it before. I found it in a book of winter poetry, and I’d never read it before, but I really liked it. It included the lines, “I heard a bird sing in the dark of December,” and although it’s January and there are still birds in Texas, I got the image. But my favorite part of it goes, “We are nearer to spring than we were in September.”

I wrote last week about the cold, and I said I didn’t want to rush through it—I would just pray for God to sustain me. And I’m still trying to do that, though I’ve been getting so tired, and so worried—lack of sunlight will do that. But the fog doesn’t last forever. It helps when you know where you’re going, or what you’re going toward, because you have something to keep your mind on, but fog is so thin and so light, how can it be so solid-feeling? Like a wall that moves when you do, that keeps you in your one-step-ahead-at-a-time mindset.

I’m waiting for the sun to come up. It will, I believe it will. People in the world wait for weeks to see the sun—some town in Norway FINALLY saw it rise last week, at one in the afternoon, and then duck back down at two. My days are brighter and longer than theirs. 

I don’t mean to be a downer, but as I told the kids the other day when we were talking about courage, “you don’t have to pretend you aren’t scared.” If you, like me, are in the bleak midwinter right now, and tired of it, you don’t have to pretend you aren’t tired. But we do have to keep going. Because someday, we’ll be inside a cloud again—it’s good to have the habit of perseverance through clouds.

It encourages me to think that all this was happening on the highway. One of the first things I wrote on The List when I started this blog was ‘drive on the highway without freaking out’. I do it every day now, so I know God has a plan for the fog, even if it takes forever to see it. 

We can do this, team.