Most mornings this month begin in white. You can hear the lake before you can see it — a duck complaining somewhere to the left, the soft knock of a rowing boat against the jetty — and then, a little before nine, it comes back one shore at a time.
I have started timing my walks around that hour. Not the fog itself, which is lovely but samey, and not the full bright morning that follows, but the in-between: when the far trees are still only suggestions and the near ones have already turned their full orange.
What the light does
Fog is a diffuser. Everything inside it is lit from every direction at once, which is why colours look so strange and saturated in it — there are no shadows to rest your eye on. When it starts to thin, the sun arrives first as a brighter patch in the white, then as a disc you can look at directly, and only then as actual light, with shadows that seem to snap into place under the benches.
It takes about twenty minutes. If you are walking at an ordinary pace, that is roughly the length of the east shore.
The trick, I think, is to not be in a hurry for it to finish.
A small routine
- Leave the house while it is still fully white. No phone in hand.
- Walk the east shore slowly. Stop at the second jetty.
- Wait for the far bank. It always comes back in the same order: the boathouse roof, then the big willow, then the hill.
- Coffee afterwards, never before.
None of this is profound. It is just a reliable twenty minutes in the day when the world is visibly assembling itself, and I have found it is very hard to be anxious while watching that happen.