the black cat and the fog

Up early, again. It is foggy in La Conner. First fog with substance this year, that I know of. Some fogs have too much substance. Spooky. This one is just right. I like to lean back in the chair out front and look at the streetlight. The roof line shades the direct light so I can see the billions of foggies swirling around in the slight breeeze, scooting in the air, chasing each other but keeping a discreet distance. Last night I watched some children play hide and seek. It makes me smile to remember. The foggies play like that, by agreement; like touch football without the touching. If they didn't, they would become rain.
It got me to thinking about dew collectors. My bicycle seat is a dew collector. All these squirreled-away tidbits of trivia poured into my consciousness. Giant hanging sheets, like functioning Cristo installations, somewhere on an arid coast, corral the fog and fresh water flows. The night I spent miserable, trying to sleep on a parkbench in San Franciscos' Golden Gate park. Overhead the trees collected fog and drove me off the bench with the cold, water-fat drops. Using rocks at the base of grapevines to collect a few precious drops each day. A cowboy movie I saw, where the hero used hot rocks to collect dew and then sopped it up with his manly neckrag. An article on the building of a pond-sized dew collector and some historical eyewitness accounts of how well these collectors function.
Endless associations and the trivia elevator working overtime shuttling up facts from the memory hole. But when I need to remember someone's name, -------------------------------------------- blank.
Oh, yeah, I remember I saw a black cat come out of the fog.