The fog is back this morning, and it's thick, sucking all the color out of the earth and sky. Fog brings with it a sense of isolation, restricting our access to the business-as-usual going on outside our field of vision. It shrinks the world into a gray space no larger than that which we can see through cobweb-laden eyes. I find the phenomenon interesting for all of about two minutes, then it becomes tiresome, and I'm ready for it to burn away.
Unless the fog is part of a story. Then, I enjoy it immensely. In a good story fog becomes a character of its own, a living character, and one to be reckoned with. It can be deliciously thrilling when it enshrouds the forest that a child entered for the first time half an hour earlier, thinking the leaf-covered path through the trees might be a shortcut home. Or when it settles over a vast lake, obscuring the shoreline from a man who has been fishing alone in a small boat and suddenly can't get his bearings. Or when great, blowing puffs of it surround the car in which a fearful woman drives in the night on a narrow, two-lane road, frantically fleeing the abusive husband she knows will awaken too soon from his drunken slumber.
Imagining those foggy scenarios made me remember a favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie, Midnight Lace, in which a newly married American woman (Doris Day) is stalked in a dense London fog. Ummm-ummm. Fog like this produces the best kind of shivers:
I love that movie. Poor, sexy Doris Day, running around in those black lace hostess pajamas as they were called, everyone thinking she made up her stalker to get attention. Good ole' Hitchcock.
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