Some boundaries dissolve in fog, and I have the sense of seeing into, around the edges of, underneath. Walking the neighborhood one foggy day, I notice that all the colors of my neighbors’ houses have changed—seem, still, to be changing. Pinks and taupes shift and settle and shift again, one into another. Grays and blues teeter and resolve, flicker and fade, suspended until I fix them with a word. It’s oddly thrilling to wait for a name to surface, to feel the lag and watch as a single color emerges from the muddle before me. Even then, I know that if I say out loud, “blue,” or “gray,” it won’t prevent the myriad halftones from unfolding again and again before my sight: a fan flicked open, a fan snapped shut. By its simplest definition, fog is water vapor suspended in air: a grounded cloud. Like a cloud, fog owes its albedo—its measure of reflected light—to those suspended water droplets, which are large enough to scatter all wavelengths equally. This gives fog its whiteness, and must affect how other colors appear. Albedo is rooted in white, from the Latin albus, as is alba, the Spanish word for “dawn,” and albumen, the white of an egg. The white, inner rind of a citrus fruit is also called albedo, and all these meanings come together in the chambers a fog makes, which touch my skin, which glow like the walls of a hollowed out orange. I can’t help thinking about the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, who knew these in-between spaces very well. In his 1928 lecture, “On Lullabies,” he describes how a child will imagine himself into the lyric of a lullaby, no matter how incomplete or cryptic it may be. He quotes this fragment: A la nana, niño mío, a la nanita y haremos en el campo una chocita y en ella nos meteremos.
38 | ANNE MCDUFFIE
Lullaby, my child, in the country we will build a tiny hut and live inside.