Friday Ramble - Taking the Sky Road Home

Only in September and October do sunsets like this come along, ground mist creeping through fields and around trees, light and sky and clouds like something out of a Maxfield Parrish painting. The clouds look like trails one could walk along, and they remind me of the title I once gave a photo, "Taking the Sky Road Home".

Fog and ground mist are common entities at sunrise and nightfall here in autumn, gossamer mantles of condensed moisture created by the earth's slow breathing and floating along, just above the surface of field and fen. We humans (and our animal kin) are cloud-breathing dragons, generating mists and fogs as we take air into our lungs and let it out again; trees breathe in and out too. As above so below, earth, sky, trees and sentient beings breathing in and out together. It's a notion dear to this old heart.

We call visible murky stuff "fog" when it reduces visibility to less than 1,000 metres, and we call it "mist" when we can see further than 1,000 meters through it. One can make out farm buildings way in the distance in the second photo, so the stuff here is mist rather than fog, and a right fine mist it is, nebulous and smoky.

I might have been anywhere in the world, but I was leaning against a fence in the eastern Ontario highlands on a cool night in late September, the collar of my jacket turned up against the wind. Resting easy in the moment, I looked on as another day drew to a close, taking photo after photo and hoping that one or two would turn out. The clouds, the setting sun, the gauzy veils of condensation floating just above the earth, all were too beautiful for words, so why was I trying to describe them?

The sun slid below the horizon, another autumn day folded up like an umbrella, and the stars came out. A brief interval this, but perfect in every way...