Flu season is early, they said. Here it is, my body said. After days of that anatomical fog, I bundled up and stepped outside into a heavy, school-delay/closing fog.

When I was a young girl waiting for the school bus after such a delay, I would cup one hand around one eye to block view of the field corn across the road and imagine that what was still visible, the drop to the creek valley, fell fathoms. What I could see in the shelter of my hand was the rise of a Great Smoky Mountain peak, trees dripping away fog. Having been to those mountains with my mom and dad, it was easy to imagine that I saw the same here.

Today, I cupped my hands around the science camera that I didn’t have then. I saw the same drop from upland black walnuts into blurred shapes in the valley. Jays scolded from above and below in the Cranberry Run floodplain, their calls amplified by airborne water droplets. The quarry wetland was barely visible over the land that bridges it and the Run. The cell phone caught some of this, but not as vibrantly as the real thing. In such a fog you can hear a leaf spin and drop into the creek flow. You can feel the fog leave drops on your exposed skin. You can startle and laugh when a fox squirrel shouts from its tree hollow.

My dad was born in the Appalachians. I wonder now if he stood outside with hot coffee and looked out through fogged-in treetops and saw something like his boyhood home. I wonder if that’s why he helped preserve this flatland place. I never asked. He did find a derelict cabin in West Virginia and brought it northwest, piece by piece, to restore on The Quarry Farm. So, maybe.