After the rains...

It happens every time after the rains---early the following morning.  It is called fog.  

You wake up, look outside, and you are immediately enveloped in it… dense, muffled sheets of white stretching throughout the drowsy landscape as far as your eyes can see...

   

Fog... like some miraculous incense rousing from the fresh wetness of supple floors; widening over the slanting roughness of the land and up the hill that parapets our little white cottage—like a fortress, and up the tips of oaks and maples that on mornings like this, are but relentless ghosts and priestesses and guardsman of the earth…  

Inexplicable wonderful dancing ghosts all over my horizon—fog.  That’s how I see it. And I have been enchanted by this phenomenon, which is compounded of a combination of heat, humidity and rain ever since we first experienced the ordinariness and strangeness of this land. Never had I seen fog in summertime while living up north… how wonderful and beautiful his earth is… and my foggy mornings part of it all—wet, and supple... cocooning my soul and my moments with magic and enchantment.

This is the road off our property early on foggy mornings…

This is the same road a few hours later when the sun had come out and melted away all traces of darkness…

How lovely everything looks under the sweet light of Autumn... I love that our little white cottage is positioned in the hollow of a hill, surrounded by lovely trees in its entirety—living ancient souls, the trees.  Always praising their Creator, always silent witnesses of man’s deeds... 

Trees talking among each others; bending down to pick up a leave that’s fallen off their shaggy green heads, or moving around when no one is watching… and always lifting up woody arms to the pallid wide openness above their canopies in sacred communion…

Two nights ago we noticed that our bedroom was strangely aglow.  Even thought it was raining outside, you could still see moonlight filtering through the windows in bright whispers of silver spilling into the shadows of our room.  We could see that outside the night was unusually bright.  I immediately knew what it was… the October’s Full Hunter’s moon.  

How you ever noticed how the October’s moon always seems brighter?  In reality she is no brighter than the other moons in a calendar year but she seems so because of the path she appears to trace through the stars.

I like to call this particular moon, the “Winter Coming Moon”, because when I used to live up North she was the moon which always reminded me that summer was dissolving away and winter was just around the corner.  We were on the onset of those long dark nights and deep cold.  So the Winter Coming Moon it was.

We went outside late the other night again, wanting to see the moon again, and we did, but it wasn’t a full moon, or the most perfect moon.  Darkness and deep silence enveloping us.  What I truly missed, however, was the songs of the cicadas serenading peaceful summer nights and the lanterns of fireflies illuminating them… a soft voice faintly whispering good-bye, until next summer.