On Slowing Down

briefly, kind of, for December

For a week now, we’ve woken up to a particular kind of morning where the fog hangs low over the peaks of the Blue Ridge, clouding up the sky, darkening the pines, shearing off the mountains’ tops in a humid gloom. Everything is sharp and blurry at once—a harbinger of how the early winter freeze will in just a few hours time give way to temperatures in t…