It was, if possible, even grayer today than yesterday. As I walked down to the courtyard to do my regular Saturday AM trip to town, it was pretty clear that the gray was here to stay:
I took a few photos from the car on the way into town. Twin Oaks is in a pleasant enough part of rural Virginia. While there’s not much in the way of wilderness or large protected tracts of land in the area, the trip to town mostly passes through small farms and forests.
Although it’s hard to see from here, there’s even a little waterfall over the mill dam on the South Anna River. It can be pretty impressive when we’ve had a lot of rain, but it’s just kind of middling these days.
As I got closer to town, the fog started getting thicker.
Seems like fog normally burns off throughout the course of the day, but as I did my shopping and errands, the fog kept getting thicker, and by the time I started home, everything looked all ghostly. The drive reminded me of another morning I was driving in the fog, just last fall.
I was doing a tofu delivery on an extremely foggy morning, couldn’t see more than 100 feet in front of me. As I started slowly driving away from Twin Oaks, I saw ahead of me that the road was closed, with some sort of emergency vehicle flashing its lights, and a guy re-directing traffic to a side road. I pulled up alongside the guy and asked what was going on?
“The faaaaaaugh,” he replied, in a thick Virginia accent.
“Excuse me?”
“The faaaaauugh.”
At this point, I’m thinking he’s saying “the fog,” that it’s so thick up ahead that they’re not letting traffic through, or that there’s a 15-car pileup just ahead caused by the fog, or that Steven King-inspired creatures are slinking about out of sight pulling people from their cars and eating them. Yikes! Then I looked into the faaaaaugh, and saw, far off through the mist (maybe a couple hundred feet away), a neighbor’s house which had turned into a burned-out shell, emitting copious clouds of smoke. Ah-ha! The “faaaaaugh” was actually the “fire!” Mystery solved, I turned off onto the detour; but to this day whenever it’s all foggy out, I think of the faaaaaugh! I’ll finish with a couple photos from my drive home, on a gray faaaaaaaugghy morning.
ObserVA 