Autumn?

We need rain so badly!! Everything is brown and dying. We don’t use sprinklers here because of the shortage of water. So I was out filling the birdbaths and noticed that the Hydrangea bush was dying. I then looked around the yard, and the only thing really green is the crab grass! Even the weeds are dead!

Last night heading out to rehearsal I saw a finger of fog sweeping up the street. AS I got closer, I noticed that it was lying low on the water, and I knew that the strait would be foggy. I took the back way into town, along the beach, and the fog was really thick and low! The ferry was in, but you could barely see it. As I headed up the hill towards Coupeville, I popped out of fog and back into sunshine.

As much as I complain about the summer weather we are having, it has been nice. But it most definitely is taking a fallish turn, you can tell by the way the breeze smells. There is a sense of ending in the crispness of it. Even though it has been hotter than normal, the nights have been cool. The Marine Layer of air comes in just before sunset, and the fog thickens and covers the water, and climbs up the hills onto the land.

Our fog is alive. It crawls at night, the cooler it gets the thicker the fog gets, and the higher it crawls. Up the hill, through the openings in the trees, along the valleys, up onto the roads, and eventually up over the top of the trees like a giant hand reaching up from the Sound to cover the land. I love autumn!!!

This morning the fog brought with it the smell of the sea. It was really thick and still, getting ready to start its crawl back out to sea, and smelled just like the ocean, mixed with the smell of the paper mill across the Strait in Port Townsend. I watched it slowly start its move back to where it sleeps during the day. It went slowly at first, and then picked up speed and retreated back the way it came, faster and faster until all of a sudden I was blinded by the brightness of the sun. It was gone again until this evening when it will try to cover the land again.