It’s fog season along the Hudson, one of my favorite times of the year. My house sits one block and a steep decline through the woods from its banks, and my bedroom window faces in its direction. This week, as I slowly woke, I could see the fog beginning to roll through my neighbors’ yards, moving towards me. The word rolling isn’t quite right, though. The fog seems to melt its way through the air on these days. I also know to make my way outside as soon as I can so that I can soak in this luxurious melancholy air.
At night, when the fog melts into the yard it becomes a medium for sleep. I usually wake at some point during the dark hours, anxiety causing the nerves in my body to pulse in pain, my breath shallow, my skin prickly. This state has led me to discover and develop some games to slow my mind and body; the river and its fog are important parts. Sometimes, I imagine the fog surrounding me, lifting me slowly out of my bed and carrying me gently through the air—not too high. We might eventually make our way to the river’s edge or we might stay within the cocoon of the woods on the way. In either case, I’m carried, supported, and the fog is a protector. Other times, I find myself walking through it, unable to see anything around me but the river’s edge, which I reach easily, before lifting off and skimming its surface, watching the stars and their reflection on its surface. If a night’s insomnia is particularly bad, though, I skip all of this and plunge directly into the river’s waters. Without the need to worry about breathing or physical stamina, I float through its depths, hearing only the drumming of its waters and the beat of my heart. Those murky, dark waters return me to sleep on a good night, soothe me on a tough one.
Fog season arrives at the same time as spider season. Heavy dew, soaking my feet even through shoes if I take a walk through the grass, hangs on the webs that fill the garden every morning. The dew makes the silken threads feel somehow even more liminal than usual; they also draw the fog closer. One long-standing structure, woven over a month ago by a funnel-web spider, covers a wide swath of space from a browning pot of chives to a basket of moonflowers nearby. I greet this furry friend each morning, watching her slip back into the depths of her translucent web when I approach.
Just across the deck, another funnel-web spider had long kept a home near a bed of catnip. That web stretches upward towards a trellis supporting morning glories that never quite arrived and down towards the hostas and secret poison ivy plant I don’t have the heart to remove. Her web is large, impressive. She was also large and impressive, which I was only able to appreciate when I found her dead body lying strangely on its side one morning. I blew gently on her, nudged the upper strands of her web, hoping she was simply hanging awkwardly. But she was gone. I admired her for several days, feeling honored to be so close to her, to observe the black and brown patterns covering her, the barbed hairs on her legs and back. Then, one morning, her body was gone, vanished from the inner chambers of her web. The wonder I’d felt when looking at her corpse so closely transformed into wonder at where her body had gone. The web was still intact, with no signs of disturbance.
It’s that sense of wonder that I’m always after, have been for years. While I still lived in Brooklyn, my husband and I visited MassMOCA on a trip through the Berkshires for my birthday. The bottom floor usually houses one of the larger exhibits on view and this one was all about wonder, the slogan “Explode Every Day” written boldly across the wall welcoming guests. During this visit, I was going through one of the worst periods of anxiety and depression I had experienced in my life. I often had to cancel plans because my body wouldn’t allow me to go down into the subway. If an event or date was on the bus route, however, my chances of making it were much better; I hyperventilated on weekend mornings—the timing was so strange because I was working as a freelancer and not tied to a specific schedule; I sometimes had to leave meals out because a panic attack would take over just as the first course arrived. The anxiety made me feel deadened and I couldn’t place where this was coming from. I also couldn’t imagine ever feeling a sense of wonder again in my life.
After we’d visited that exhibit, even though my anxiety didn’t lessen and my sense of wonder was still largely gone, I kept thinking about one of the pieces in the show, a small seam of gold that snaked through the museum’s outdoor plaza. My memory pictures it as not much thicker than a line of rope, but the way it shimmered drew my eyes down to it and followed it through its course in the concrete. The artist, Rachel Sussman, was inspired by the traditional Japanese art from Kintsukuroi in which gold is used to repair broken ceramics. In this case, gold was used to repair and beautify broken concrete slabs. She uses a combination of tree sap-based resin with a bronze and 23.5-carat gold dust mixture to fill in these gaps, fissures, cracks. Part of the magic of this technique is that the effect is so subtle it feels like seeing a fleck of magic just out of view.
If my sense of wonder was nonexistent back then, it has grown into something quite healthy again. The quiet and solitude of the pandemic is what allowed it to find its way back, I suspect, to become something I no longer have to work at to experience. My anxiety isn’t always under control, but it’s better than it was around the time of that trip; or, perhaps, I just have better tools now to deal with it.
I showed my husband a picture of the group I attended master naturalist training with a few weeks ago. The weeks leading up to it were filled with anxiety—I hadn’t considered what it would feel like to spend a weekend sleeping, eating, and learning with strangers. Thirty-one of us stayed in rustic cabins in a forest near Ithaca for a weekend, taking classes on amphibians, lichens, bats, trees, and lots of other things. In this particular picture, maybe seven or eight adults are hovered around an old wooden bench near the main building of this adult camp. What do you think they’re looking at? I asked him. He had no idea. Lichens, I replied. Those adults are fascinated by lichens growing on that old bench. This is what the entire weekend was like: adults huddled around unimpressive-looking structures and rocks and trees, fully immersed in and seeking wonder.
I feel this wonder in so many moments and have for a while.
That weekend away, during an owl walk, when the International Space Station floated through the sky. It moved differently from a plane; there was something so smooth about the way it glided, like a modern steel rollercoaster versus a vintage one made from wood. I’d been seeing videos online of people unexpectedly seeing a Starlink launch, which we also saw a few moments later. Eight or ten satellites connected in a row appeared suddenly above the horizon, glowing blue as they climbed and climbed before, just, disappearing. Like many others who have experienced this, the crowd at first felt horror, uncertainty, then settled into the strange spectacle. A green object of some sort shot through the sky behind us soon after. The night before three of us had stayed outside a little later than the rest as one of the trainees pointed out the constellations to us. The Milky Way glowed above us, and I saw no fewer than four shooting stars on that dark night.
This year, when I finally understood the burnweed that grows around my porch and deck. The plant, a native species loved by wasps (who are loved by me), showed up last year after I’d begun to cultivate some new beds in my yard. I mistook it as a nuisance that first summer, seeing its strange flowers as something that hadn’t quite developed rather than for the curious forms they are. The plant, which looks much like hyssop as it grows—a strong central stalk with stemmed flowers growing off of it—seems to stop just shy of becoming a blooming plant. The flowers are tightly bound cylinders whose petals never spill out, but rather stay within their green casing. I couldn’t imagine there was much use for them, until I saw one wasp and then another feeding on its nectar. The wasps understood its worth, and I simply needed to be taught. When the flowers are spent, they open up and release wispy cotton-like seeds into the wind. Their lightness adds drama to their flight, as they climb then dip, climb then dip, fully embraced by the breeze’s whims.
Finally, a tiny frog sleeping inside a rose on a misty morning. I was up a bit earlier than usual and the day was cloudy. The heaviness of the air, gray of the sky, gave everything an extra glitter. I was fixated on my passionflower vine, wondering when the next batch of blooms would arrive, when I glanced quickly at the rose bush. A patch of brown, the size of a thumbnail, filled the space of one of the rose petals and I supposed it was turning before the rest of its flower. But I took a closer look and saw webbed feet clinging to the petals’ fibers, then an entire small body tucked between them. I pulled the flower close to my face and saw the frog’s eyes shut tightly as he continued to snooze. My phone told me he was a spring peeper; I’d never seen one before, only heard them in the night. I took a few photos before leaving the rose and its slumberer alone for good. A couple of hours later, unable to resist taking one final peek, I returned to the flower, but the frog was already gone. I sat in the sun and imagined his tiny body, with its tiny fingers and toes, creeping along the branches of the rose bush as he moved on with his day and out of my view.
