rising in silence
floating feather light toward dawn
dandelion fog
fog
A Happy Accident
Sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis)
When seafog persists along the upper Texas coast during our transition from winter to spring, milky white skies and limited visibilty are the order of the day.
So it was yesterday, as I roamed the west end of Galveston Island in search of Spring. Crossing over San Luis pass, I paused for a walk into a bayside marsh when the unmistakable, gutteral cry of sandhill cranes began echoing through the air.
Not expecting to sight them in the fog, I gave not a thought to camera settings until they crossed in front of me, their great wings creating eddies in the fog.
Shooting into milky skies with who-knows-what settings is an iffy proposition at best. But to my surprise, the photos in the series seem perfectly right: a delightful evocation of a foggy island day.
Comments always are welcome.
Happiness, In A Fog
Early morning fog, Bastrop Bayou
Rather than defining happiness, the poet Jane Kenyon prefers to describe its coming in her poem of the same name.
There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.
And, I might add, it comes to the egret and heron alike, to the bank-lining reeds, and to the watcher in the fog. It may even come to the fog, unless, of course, it comes as the fog itself.
Lagniappe 