Fog

It is very foggy in the Bay Area.

You would think I would remember this, that 8+ years living away would not have wiped my memory of this integral fact, but it seems to have slipped through the cracks. The window that looks out onto the bay from the dining room at my mother's house here in Mill Valley is white with fog, criss-crossed with telephone lines and bordered with leafy green. And red. And greygreenred.

I went jogging today on the bike path that runs under the freeway, to Sausalito and San Francisco, and was almost trampled by a woman with an industrial-sized baby buggy and golden retriever.  They came out of nowhere. Manifested out of the white. I dodged them, barely. Must remember the sporty yuppy factor when in Marin. Not so much a problem back in Paris. In Paris jogging threats were mostly limited to guys overexcited about the idea of a woman with stamina. Or people picnicking on the canal. Or my own incapacity to multitask (unzipping my sweatshirt, changing my music, and keeping my feet going on uneven terrain having ended in bloody knees on more than one occasion). Here it seems the fog can hide all sorts of forgotten threats.

In the strong visibility of of the living room, my cats are having a face-off. Paris trying to gain terrain on California. Shady, so named by one of my college housemates for her ability to sneak around and grab at people's ankles from under beds and tables and couches, is trying to hold her home turf. Her low-pitched threats sound impressive, at least for a cat protected by the slats and legs of the piano chair. Shady is the matriarch. I left her here with my mother in 2003, when I went to Paris "for a year or so" to check things out. Shady has since been joined by Kittyton, the lumbering star of my brother's youtube channel, and now Maya, straight off the plane from France, has come to rattle the delicate balance. Right now Maya is lying on the floor, about five feet away, watching. Every now and then she sneaks closer, bridging the gap, working on reducing the space between them. 

I imagine them outside, in a ring covered in white fog, darting in and out, circling and hissing, until they decide it's not worth it and lie down in a dogpile. Well... catpile.

While the cats try to get used to each other, my brother is lying on the couch, watching baseball. He and my mother are teasing me for my lack of player and stat knowledge. I tell them that it's not that I am not a fan, I just don't particularly care. My mother says it's only a matter of time. That soon enough I'll be sporting orange and black, shouting at the TV and refusing to go to the kitchen to replenish snacks when it's my turn. Maybe so. 

But for now the fog is too much for me.