Gray Mist

This morning was a foggy one.  Not too common for South Florida.  I still get caught up in the emotions of the mist just as I did when I was a child.  I used to be enthralled with the ghostly weather and would scurry to a quiet place to create, pencil in hand, scratching a mysterious story into existence.  As an adult, I still feel a connection with that young girl.  Only now, in addition to the dash to my quiet place, I acknowledge the uncanny sensation of ties to those who passed.  Who are now caught in a misty limbo of sorts, misconceived as haunters, who are the ones haunted.  I can relate to their restlessness, their shadows.  Memories, donned in disguise, creep in and stir up latent emotions that persist under the conscious radar.  I am left, like a viewer seated on a cold, padded folding chair, in a darkened room.  An old projector flashes images in black and white on the bare wall in front of me:  wet children in soggy socks smiling, laughing their way down a slip and slide,  mockingbirds shrilly calling, waiting, fluttering to land in my cupped palms, greedily gobbling crimson cranberries, a butterfly garden bathed in moonlight, the intoxicating, overwhelming perfume of  night- blooming jasmine, being cradled, feeling safe, protected for the first time in more than a decade, by someone who was my home, although I had been displaced,  whose frame wasn’t four walls and a roof, rather a soul enveloping embrace. The fog has lifted, somewhat, but the pregnant, gray clouds overtly hint at imminent, cleansing precipitation. . .