A misty morning, up and down the street

I do love a misty morning, and in my long stroll through the still-sleepy back streets, using the excuse (if an excuse for a walk is ever needed) of needing to go get some milk, I tried to figure out why.

Perhaps it's nostalgia from a childhood of morning fogs in the Lower Fraser Valley, fogs generated by the sawdust burners at the sawmills along the river in those heedless times. Waking under a white blanket of fog; leaving the warm bright shell of home, then walking to the bus stop to wait for the school bus, and again a warm shell to carry us through the indistinct but well known landscape.

Or, something about places you know well that are now partly obscured - having only the nearest things visible. Hmm, that's rather like walking around without glasses on - only without the glasses, for me, even the near things are blurry. Blur is different than mist - it doesn't lift, for one thing. (Thank heavens for corrective lenses!)

Again, it could be to do with the secretiveness of distance, lost in the mist ... what surprises might be lurking, or waiting, in the familiar environment once we reach that farther place and can see it clearly?

Perhaps it's the way mist makes things quieter - not as quiet as snow does, but a damping down of All That Noise. In the mist, we're focusing on the altered visual, the distant impenetrable ... and it's the subliminal aural muffling that gives the air of mystery.