A bit of fog would be nice

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg

It is a sweltering afternoon of a typical Missouri summer day, where the heat continues to increase as the day wears on and by about 5 p.m., walking into the microscopic great room of our house (kitchen, dining room, living room) – which is not air conditioned – from the office where I work, with its little window A/C unit, is like walking into a blast furnace.

Just about then my sweet sister, 1,500 miles away on the left side of the country, sends me an e-mail with a picture of the beach at Morro Bay, along the central California coast, that her daughter took when they went there for a wedding.

Stephen King wrote a story (which was made into a TV movie) about a fog that settles over a town and horrible monsters appear out of the fog and kill people.

Nothing horrible happens in this picture though, just a couple of curlews going about their business and staying just ahead of the waves that roll in, looking for sand crabs and other things to eat in the wash zone before they bury themselves in the sand.

We camped at the state park at Morro Bay sometimes when I was a kid. And that brings back another memory of fishing with my father off the pier at Morro Bay and catching a red snapper, and of being frightened one night by an owl hooting in a tree near our campsite.

The suburb of Los Angeles where we grew up was about 10 miles from the ocean, and in the late afternoons the breeze would come up off the ocean and often the fog would roll in, cooling everything down, and then gradually burn off in the mornings. They started coining terms for it “May Gray” and “June Gloom” almost in a complaining way.

Oh, for a bit ocean breeze and some late afternoon fog.