clarity captured in the fog

Loneliness surrounds the sound of a foghorn, off in the distance........heard but unseen. It pulls you into a feeling of mysterious uncertainty, its sound wavering in the air as it moves through the cocoon of clouds which have touched the earth. It's difficult to gain your bearings to know precisely where it is echoing from. Hidden in the fog mask, the spooky call haunts thoughts, and pulls at the chords of our own fears, beckoning them to reveal themselves in the density of the surrounding air.

I love foggy nights in Spencer's Island, Nova Scotia.......the place where my mother in law grew up and continued to spend summers surrounded by her family and friends............loving the foggy days too. It was something we had in common. I love watching it roll in with the tide lapping up the beach......enveloping the homes and buildings tucked into the hill close to the shore. They are a common occurance because the air and tides mix beautifully to make this natural blanketing happen. Peripheral sounds are muffled leaving the more important ones heightened and heard in between the foghorn blasts.

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Early evening around a campfire in June, I was surrounded by my family and some good friends whom we hadn't seen since last summer. The tides had rolled in and out many times bringing in the flotsam of life leaving stark realities and a few precious moments both of which we have learned from and taking away time and a layer of innocence. We caught up while sipping on wine and embracing our short visiting time together. We cling to these sparse life moments when winter forces the distance between them. As we mingled, some standing away from the fire, and some sitting in lawn chairs close to the flames, we marvelled at the expansive vista down from the cliff we are situated overlooking the beach and bay.......... a feast for the tired eyes.

I find it the most meaningful on the first and last glance of the season.........

As the fog rolled in, the air became more and more chilled.........one at a time people left to go inside to warm up taking their conversations with them......... until I am left alone. I stoked the fire, pulled my chair closer and listened to the faraway familiar sound of the foghorn while staring at the flames rising from the red embers. It's a mesmerizing flamenco dance of leaping flames. The sparks escaping from the tips of the dancing flames and float up into the dark freedom until they disappeared into the fog. In between the call of warning, when silence settles into the cadence of the crackling fire, I felt an unexpected welling of emotions stirring in a place where the past and the present meet.

I realized right then in a split second moment that I wasn't alone after all. I looked up and around and saw the vacated chairs pulled up to the firepit........and felt the presence of a past generation mingling on their own. My mother in law, Mim, my father in law, George (aka Buzzie)...........Mim's brother Max and his wife Patty. They too had spent many evenings together sitting around campfires on the beach in Spencer's Island during youthful courting, continuing on into adulthood while their own children grew up together learning life lessons and accumulating remember whens......a campfire circle of life set against the tidal pull.

I could hear them talking..................not their words, just the sound of their voices captured by the fog, pulled in by the tide. Every once in a while I could hear the realness of Uncle Max's laugh, the higher pitch of Aunt Patty's Cape Breton cadence. I could hear Buzzie's ever present charisma and Mim laughing at something...........her wit and her sense of humour always spicy...........like her family name.............Spicer.........

It all felt very real and connected to the threads families weave. I remembered past conversations with Mim about how she felt when she returned to open up the old house every summer...........how she always felt the presence of her own parents and it made me wonder if she felt a cocooning sense of the past always while living in her childhood home, while walking down paths and roads she had travelled with a stick in hand as a kid.

I wondered what memories she revisited whenever she unpacked a picnic lunch while settling into a familiar cove with a group of old friends who also returned in the summer with their broods............or when she stood for an hour in the raspberry patch behind the house cleanly picking the juicy berries for pies and jelly making? Did her ancestors visit often? I think they did. And now, she has joined them, along with many from her generation to visit us........to visit me, bringing the past into the present.

It flooded me with memories of when they were all there in body and not just spirit though it was always spirited. Certain beach suppers filtered through my thoughts.......the time Uncle Max cooked up a mess of lobster back in his maple sugar camp and brought them to us on the beach to dive into.........the time when we journeyed to Spicer's Cove where the sand is finely ground and sticks to salty wet feet and your the bum of your pants that is settled into an own made divoted spot............the infamous Sunday brunch that turned into a long leisurely gathering that went well into the evening..........the time when Buzzie dressed up in tails and tophat found in the attic to join us for cooked hotdogs over an open fire......and the real dogs.........all the family dogs hovering around him because he was the one who would ALWAYS sneak them a bite. he could NEVER walk away from the sad mournful eyes of his canine companions.

The past and present woven together touching the space all around me........a space of fog and smoke..........a space where the fire sends out sparks into the night.........a space where the silence of the foghorn opens a window onto familiar lives, familiar sounds clear as a sunny day.

The human eye sees the empty chairs sitting in the fog. The spirit eye sees it very differently. The human ear hears the loneliness of the foghorn streaking through the clouds settled on the surface. But the spirit ear hears the hum of grace caught in the blanket of human connections, both past and present. In this one otherworldly moment while sitting seemingly alone in the tidal air mist, I was left with a sense that I had been given a glimpse into the vast holiness of infinity.

I realized that this is the one place in the whole world where I can learn the meaning of it from the eternal ebb and flow of ancestral life and death and life and death......and of passing it on...... I also realized that this is the very reason why it will be difficult to walk away completely from a home filled with generations of building fires together. The old house and the property is now in flux. We don't have legal access to it while the estate matters are incomplete. And, when it is, we have decided that it will be necessary to walk away from it for many unresolvable reasons.

But, if this is where infinity dwells, it will always be there to slip back into another time. The homefires will always be welcoming........in time.