(courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons)Fog has become a regular occurrence here in sunny Alberta. Not the early morning diaphonous belts that commuters can blast through or the isolated cloud that squats over the lake but the thick material that shrouds absolutely everything revealing vehicles and pedestrians at the last possible moment, threading along the streets andFog alters the mind. The world that once existed for as far as the eye could see is now circumscribed, the boundaries of existence drawn close. You have to believe that there is more out there not because you can see it but because it must be so. Much is left to logic. Even more to faith.There is nothing more useful to a writer than a fog to illustrate the unknown and the unexpected. It's the standard setting in the detective noir genre. Need to heighten the suspense? Deepen the fog. It seems as soon as humans have their vision impaired, we are instinctively prone to fear, to the expectation that nothing good this way comes.Driving in fog is stressful, since highways are designed for us to see farther than the faint gleam of red from the tail lights of the only discernible vehicle. But there is the element of the otherworldly, the dreamy state where life is a slow unfolding, a softened lens on all that is harsh and inescapable.On the days that the fog lifted or is burned away, there is the crystal bright hoar frost built on tree limbs during those days of diminished light and now released in all its severe breathtaking brilliance. A reminder that all will be revealed in its own good time.