In a Fog and/or the Horrors of Hoarfrost

All right, I mentioned a couple posts back that I wanted to talk about fog, since we've had so much of it lately -- and we've still had quite a bit, along with a lot of hoarfrost. First, the fog.
I've always loved foggy days. The foggier, the better -- as long I'm not driving in it on the highway. I love being wrapped in the mist. On foggy days, I wish there was a woods nearby that I could walk in! It's mysterious, romantic, fantastical. I've always loved clouds, too. (In junior high, when one of my teachers had us write our goals for life, I wrote that I wanted to go to France and photograph clouds, since my three loves were France, photography -- and clouds!) Fog is like a cloud come down to earth. Actually, it IS a cloud come down to earth. When I was in MOB (Midnight Oil Burners) in high school, I wrote a poem about fog. It went something like, "A sleepy Sunday morn/I walk out of my door/Into a cloud of fog," and people think it's going to be this sappy thing. Then I talk about seeing my car, which at the time was a white 1960s-era Mercury Comet, and say "Knots tie in my belly./I am sick." The Comet wasn't really a bad little car; I was just trying to say that suddenly I was transported back into the real world by the sight of something real and solid -- my car. I know, if you have to explain your poem, maybe it's not that good -- but former MOB member and classmate Freddie Kaplan, who's now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, actually got it and had nice things to say about it (although I doubt he even remembers my poem now). Anyway, I love fog and have enjoyed these foggy days. I mean, we could have had a lot worse weather -- like ice storms.

And having so much fog this time of year has had an added advantage. Along with the fog, we've had hoarfrost. I can't believe so many locals have mentioned that they've never heard of or seen hoarfrost before. Where have these people been? I've known about it practically my whole life. I asked my kids if they remembered ever seeing it before, because I couldn't remember how often we'd had it in the past -- although I was fairly certain the kids HAD seen it before. (I just wasn't sure they remembered it, since I couldn't remember when we'd last had it.) And they remembered seeing it before and knew what it was. Our local ABC affiliate, KAKE-TV in Wichita, even had a piece about it on their "Good Question" segment a couple weeks ago. Seems someone didn't realize the way this phenomenon was spelled and thought it was an obscene word. Jeff Herndon, the newscaster who does this segment, explained that "hoar" means "to grey with age" and hoarfrost turns everything grey or white. I admit it's a bit unusual to have had so much fog in winter (and therefore so much hoarfrost). But it's just like when we get in cycles of a lot of rain or a lot of high winds. It's not like it's some bad omen or something. And it's been really pretty with all the treetops tinged in white. It killed me not to have one of my cameras in the car with me as I drove through parts of Hutch that were exceedingly foggy and "hoarfrosty" some of those days! I had to settle for taking a few photos of what little hoarfrost we had around our yard, which wasn't much.
I just hope it's a long, long time -- long after I have hoary hair -- before my brain is truly foggy!