soft

I'm not one for cities.
My father used to laugh (likely he still does) that I considered growing up in New Jersey, industrial US, rural.  The fact remains however that I spend most of my time outside in the woods, in our huge yard, or my friends woods and even bigger "yards".  There were farms with growing pumpkins, corn, and other sensible vegetation visible from the school bus everyday on the way to school.  My best friend grew up on horses, and I worked in two barns. The church we went to was merely a church and not a stadium. It was down a gravel road and across from a field good for hay rides. At night when we slept, there were no sirens, no cars, no pulsing beat of music.  Some summer nights I would be kept awake by the sound of cicadas (or some similarly noisy insect). It may have been rural, it may have merely been suburban. Whatever it was, it was not a city.

I've lived other places since, more rural and more urban. I still find that the quiet of the rural is home. Winter is the only time I can almost feel at home in the suburbs.  The air is crisper. If I close my eyes and breath deeply the snowy scent, it's almost like tasting a memory.

But I find there are some things that I appreciate living on the outskirts of San Francisco.  From here, I can watch the fog. It rolls in over the water like a giant transient mountain, hovering curiously, restrained by an invisible boundary, like a snowy avalanche on pause. So solid, fierce, even devastating... and yet also soft. Soft as a cloud I could lay myself on.

I may not be one for the cities. But these tendrils of nature...they find me. And for a while, I'm home.

Cheers,

Fog City Baer