mist

I went a walk from Langbank to Port Glasgow today. The frost had captured the land, held it static and wet. The mist was thick and blinding. So thick that anything was possible, the palette was near blank where I walked and the mind felt the tight chill in the air and moved to populate the unseen.
A sudden flash of fox tail, russet against the white hoar, appeared and was gone. Geese, somewhere in the shrouded sky, honked away to appear suddenly just overhead, then to be swallowed up again by the white. Their disconsolate call and response in the chevron, a broken trolley wheel squeaking away towards the river.
Further on, sheep were jumping and bucking and butting heads in a field, a daub of red on their wool. Colour, at least.

(Red for the rutting ram. And the fox's flashing tail. And the underwing of the redwings hopping in a line across the frosty grass. And the ghostly retreating brake-lights as a car is made phantom again by the mist.)

As I got closer to Port Glasgow the mist started to thin. Gradually the firth unfurled beside me as I walked. Snow on the Argyll hills across the water, on Ben Lomond. The river still as the fields. Jackdaws were busy black. The path became a street became a road became my parent's house and warmth and hot soup.

"I can smell the fresh air off you!" my mum said.

And I did carry a chill with me, like the presence of a ghost moving through the house. The ghost of a fox and geese and redwings and sheep all still out there unseen. All right here at the tips of my warm fingers as I type.