Sighs of Acceptance 

It’s been another relatively snowless, chilly-but-sunny Adirondack Coast day, perfect for tree work and cleaning up an obsolete, tumbledown water tower (updates soon). With only a week to go in my “Dry January”, I’m looking forward to celebrating both projects soon. In the meantime, I offer you a visual revisit of the wispy mists I described last month as Lake Champlain’s sighs of acceptance.

The surface of Lake Champlain appears to be smoking. Lake smoke. It’s not, of course, but the illusion is spellbinding.

Steam fog (aka sea smoke) happens when cold, wintery air collects over the lake’s moist heat sink. Such a huge, deep body of water holds plenty of residual heat from warmer months… The wispy-but-opaque evaporation fog tells the story this morning: still warm-ish lake water overcome with cold winter air. Like a slow, visual sigh of acceptance. (Source: Lake Smoke)

Ferry crossing,
wending wispy 
morning mistiness
and afternoon haze,
unbraiding brume,
time and timeless
ambiguous.
Again.

Seems suiting
somehow, some how,
this midwinter moment,
this invernal verge,
weather and world
so much in flux,
water warm still,
unstill wind chill,
lingering lakescape,
colloquy cooling,
sighs of acceptance. 

So many sighs of acceptance, it seems. Some, like the lake smoke, are subtle. Others — felling a gnarled white pine, chainsawing the trunk into logs, chipping the rest into mulch — are less subtle.

During a ferry ride between Charlotte and Essex, cold air tightening the skin on my cheeks, lake surface viscous, flirting with freezing, lake fog mellow and mysterious, there’s temptation to yield just a bit. To surrender to the surreal. To join the sighs of acceptance.

Or not.

Observe.

And anticipate another cold blast. Maybe freezing the lake for the first time in a while…