I have a strange but very vivid memory from childhood, from a time just after my family had moved to a new house, which, itself, was kind of a strange and disruptive event in my young life. It wasn’t negative. I was only four when we moved, though the memories from our first house seem so much longer than that. And though the new neighborhood wasn’t that far from the old one it still seemed like a very new and very different world.
The early experience I remember so clearly at the new house is a day when there was fog. The new house was on a hill and I could stand in the driveway, or look out my bedroom window, over the backyard and see for miles, all the way to a very distant row of hills where radio towers stood. The fog had spread out over the low lying area between me and those radio towers, and had even reached up to them, obscuring the hills, but I thought I could see construction equipment—tall cranes and bulldozers. Maybe I’d seen them earlier, before the rain and the fog. This seems plausible; at that time there were a lot of new buildings going up in that area as the city expanded.
I was in the driveway looking at this scene and my new friend Troy, who lived at the bottom of the hill, was with me. I thought I could hear the construction equipment, the clanking and grinding of gears, though this was probably just my imagination. Maybe it’s something my mind has added in the intervening years. Maybe none of this even happened and it was all something I dreamed, but I distinctly remember Troy saying, “A cloud fell. They’re trying to put it back up.”
I don’t know if he was serious. He was four too and we both had really active imaginations, and maybe he thought that was really how the world worked: clouds as something people made, shifted into place, controlled. It was a wonderful idea, and I think my mind has held onto it for so long because it makes the world a little more interesting, a little more magical to imagine clouds work that way.
I still like fog, too. It has a wonderful way of making the familiar unfamiliar, renewing my appreciation of the world around me. And then it goes, leaving only a memory, because it can’t last. Or, as King Arthur once sang,
By eight, the morning fog must disappear.
In short, there’s simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
<
p style=”text-align: center;”>In Camelot.
Magical, Chris. Thanks for always making this a most congenial spot.
I appreciate you helping make my own little Camelot a better place.
Beautiful memory. Thank you for sharing it ❤️ I’m with you—I think there’s something magical about the fog. And I love Camelot????
I’ve always been fascinated by fog–it’s there but also not there, and it amazes me that it always seems to be somewhere else. That is, wherever I’m standing in fog seems to be clear but if I move there’s fog where I was. Camelot is a great musical too. I was lucky enough to see Richard Harris in person once!