Morning Mist

Some mornings the whole city wakes up knowing the same thing, and nobody said it. Before sunrise a thin mist drifts out of Trout Lake, where it waited through the meeting, and settles over every district. It catches on telephone wires, wet paint, rails, glass, seawall lamps and the branches of trees.

It carries no instructions. Nothing is written in the air. But watch what happens under it. A painter turns toward a wall she was not going to paint today. A radio three streets away changes its tone at the same moment. A lamp on the seawall seems to lean into its post. Things that have nothing to do with each other change together, quietly, as if they had all been told.

That is how you spot it. Not by the weather, which is only Vancouver weather, but by the way the city agrees with itself all at once. The mist carries what is needed, not how to do it.