Behind the Fog

When I see fog, I think of sunlight. I think of the string of clear days at the beginning of each December where the sky blushes blue and cold. I think of a stream I once saw, tucked into a shore-pine forest by the ocean, how I wandered there at dawn in a sea of fog and huckleberries, how, as an owl sang curtly in the distance, I stopped to watch two swans glide like ghosts above the mirrored water, their necks bent, their eyes calm and speckled with dew. I think of a hill in town, the douglas firs who grow there, how the fog peels off their branches in the mornings, how it rises, how it lifts, how it leaves behind a rich, dark green that makes me homesick when I see it elsewhere.