Summer Rhythm

Sunlight is darting through shreds of fog that trail about like visible dreams.  The drifting vapors make shifting shapes overhead, now thickening densely and then thinning into transparency again.  The fog seems bound straight for inland valleys but then pulls back again, as if breathing heavily, in and out, over the course of the day.  

The dance moves mysteriously and silently without end all summer long, tempo quickened by northern or southern breezes in the afternoon, quieting after the sun sails over the western horizon.

You see a grey smudge heaving over the hilltops in the distance as if the hills themselves were pulling a gray blanket up to their chins and curling up for a nap.  But, the stern draping blanket cools the hills down and they lie shivering and damp in the cold gray light.

It's the summer rhythm of our coast, the respiration of an ecosystem, visible as moving moist air and the rise and fall of varying breezes.  If the sun glances back at a certain time of afternoon and finds thin spots in the fog, the tawny grasses that flank rolling hills are set alight and glow.