Lunging in a Cloud

Lunging in a Cloud

by Susan Fay

     No winter in all my Oregon winters has ever been like this.  It's not the absence of rain that gives these short days a sometimes surreal and often ethereal, enchanted feel; it's the presence of the fog.  Thick, soupy, and a mean grey; ghostly as white down feathers floating on a breeze; or translucent and brimming with blue sky, this fog has many guises.

     Some days are bone-chillingly cold; others are unseasonably warm.  Fog is, by definition, little more than "condensed water vapor," an earthbound cloud of sorts.

     To my eye, its presence softens every line and edge.  The seductively wonderful lines of a horse become even more so against this winter's dreamy backdrops.  Cattle are mysterious and wise.  The ducks -- tiny comical dinosaurs at best -- become regal busybodies.  There is a sensory value to fog, too.

     It is contiguous in a way that air cannot be.  Picture a horse orbiting you, trotting at the end of the lunge line, the one you hold in your right hand.  In your left hand, the lunge whip is strategically balanced.

     With each movement -- yours or that of the horse -- tiny water droplets are displaced.  If you close your eyes and empty your mind, I swear you will feel it.

     While others mourn their missed rain, the inches of mountain snow to crisscross, I do not.  Horses and cattle plus rain equal mud, mud, and more mud.  There is mud enough without the thundering downpours of a true Oregon winter.

     Give me just enough liquid to water the coming summer and no more and I will be eternally grateful for life in this lovely, low-lying cloud.

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If you would like to use or publish this mini-story, please contact me at susan.fay@coho.net.