Thursday, January 13, 2005
Boston did not smile this morning. There was a heavy cloud cover and we were under some kind of temperature inversion. Warm, moist air was being held down against a couple of storms' worth of ice and crusted snow. The result was a thick fog. I've actually always loved fog, particularly for the way it flattens houses, walls and trees into receding layers, separating them shadowlessly in a mass of luminous cloud.
A couple of summers ago, Fritz and I were traveling across Scandinavia on our way to joining friends on the west coast of Denmark. Due to a train scheduling problem, the Danish railway put us into a Mercedes Benz taxi and a delightful young man drove us for several hours across half the country. The Danes know a lot about fog and our driver told us that the Danish word for fog translates as "sea dust."
I've always thought of fog as being very Japanese. It's not just because Japan is a grouping of islands and must have a fair amount of ocean mist, but because I fell in love very early with ukyio-e, the traditional wood block prints of Japan. Depicting weather of various kinds delighted a lot of the famed print artists who worked through the challenge of depicting translucent conditions like rain, ice and fog in graphic line and by shading colors together on the flat wood block surfaces to suggest indefinate distance.
Our yo-yo weather continues. The high temperature for the day is predicted for midnight tonight--at or near 60 degrees. Then tomorrow the temperature will plunge again and we'll have more snow or freezing rain. There's a reason this place is called New ENGLAND.
A couple of summers ago, Fritz and I were traveling across Scandinavia on our way to joining friends on the west coast of Denmark. Due to a train scheduling problem, the Danish railway put us into a Mercedes Benz taxi and a delightful young man drove us for several hours across half the country. The Danes know a lot about fog and our driver told us that the Danish word for fog translates as "sea dust."
I've always thought of fog as being very Japanese. It's not just because Japan is a grouping of islands and must have a fair amount of ocean mist, but because I fell in love very early with ukyio-e, the traditional wood block prints of Japan. Depicting weather of various kinds delighted a lot of the famed print artists who worked through the challenge of depicting translucent conditions like rain, ice and fog in graphic line and by shading colors together on the flat wood block surfaces to suggest indefinate distance.
Our yo-yo weather continues. The high temperature for the day is predicted for midnight tonight--at or near 60 degrees. Then tomorrow the temperature will plunge again and we'll have more snow or freezing rain. There's a reason this place is called New ENGLAND.
