I moved out here for the job, not for the mountains, and it took me embarrassingly long to actually notice what the mountains do to a normal Tuesday morning. There’s a stretch of road I take to the clinic that drops down into a hollow, and on the right kind of cool morning the fog just sits there, thick enough that you lose the road markings for a few seconds at a time, and you come out the other side of it like you’ve driven through a wall into a completely different, sunnier day.

I used to hate this. It adds ten, sometimes fifteen minutes to a drive that’s already not short, and for the first year I lived here I treated it purely as an obstacle, something between me and being on time. I don’t know exactly when that flipped, but at some point I started leaving a few minutes earlier specifically so I could slow down through that stretch instead of white-knuckling it, and now it’s become the part of the morning I actually look forward to, weirdly, more than coffee some days.

Theo thinks I’m being dramatic about weather, which, fair, he grew up somewhere flatter and doesn’t have the same relationship with fog that I’ve apparently developed. But there’s something about driving through something you genuinely can’t see the other side of, trusting that the road continues even though the evidence in front of you is just white for a few seconds, that I think has quietly rewired how I feel about a lot of smaller uncertain things. Not in some grand life-lesson way I want to oversell here. Just, practically, my tolerance for not being able to see what’s directly ahead of me has gone up since I started actually paying attention to this instead of resenting it.

The clinic gets its own version of this too, foggy mornings meaning slower intake because the roads are worse for anyone bringing in an injured animal, so there’s a rhythm to it, quiet fog mornings followed by a rush once people can actually drive normally again. I’ve started keeping half an eye on the forecast the night before, not for planning purposes really, just because I like knowing whether tomorrow’s drive is going to be the ordinary kind or the kind where the mountains disappear for a while and then hand themselves back to you.