Last night, I accidentally left my car parked on the street.  When I realized this in the morning, I was instantly frustrated.  I have some reasons — none of them positive — for wanting to park my car close to, or in, my garage.  I sent my daughter out to get into the car, picked up my bag, walked out behind her, and found her standing in front of the car, her mouth literally agape.  She was staring at the park at the end of the road, a view she never sees because we usually pull out from the garage and drive in the opposite direction.  “Look at the beautiful, glorious fog!” she said, a bit too loud.  “I’m never not coming out here again in the morning!”

She was right.  The fog was exquisite, hanging above the earth like spools of thin silver twine kicking off sunlight.  But we had to get to school, so we quickly drove away.

After drop off, I ran smack into another problem.  A road closure had diverted traffic, so it took me twenty minutes to travel 1.5 miles from my daughter’s school to mine.  Since I arrived late, I wasn’t able to complete the one task that I needed to complete before 8 a.m.  I was supposed to return proofread comments (which we send home to parents) to teachers’ mailboxes.

Knowing I was late, I decided to walk around the building and hand each teacher his / her proofread comments.  This only amounted to twelve teachers, but on my trip around the building, which was frustrating at first and certainly not my normal routine, I noticed something interesting in almost every quiet corner of the school: the human equivalent of exquisite fog, hanging above the earth like spools of thin silver twine kicking off sunlight.