Coming in this morning there was just about every shade of blue imaginable filling the sky. Including the color of my kitchen in the northwest part of the atmosphere. There was also a thick layer of fog settling down around houses, street lamps and baseball fields.
"Ah yah, it was as thick as a pea soup, it was, ah yah."
That's the saying, anyway. Not quite sure how it came about. Pea soup, if you've ever had it, is not exactly a breakfast food, which is the time of day your most likely to come across thick fog. But I can see why other soups aren't used. Wedding Soup, Chicken Noodle Soup, even Broccoli and Cheddar, just don't quite describe the thickness of the fog, nor do they have the same ring to it. 'As thick as Lobster Bisque?' No. Maybe Campbell's could advertise the thickness of their Chunky's brand by trying to re-invent the expression.
We always describe things in terms of other things. Like fog and pea soup. Like the morning sky and my kitchen. But I'm not entirely sure how to describe things as they intrinsically exist.
Besides, my grandfather's expression wouldn't have resonated with me had he waxed on about the opacity and the paradox of the magnificent translucency of the morning fog, dense with vapors of a coming day, yearning to burn off and reveal the hours before us, hours that were hinted at by stray rays of sunlight here and there, sunlight already searing through an otherwise wall of whiteness. One that disappeared the moment you tried to touch it. The future comes to us, we must wait for it to reveal itself. Ah yah.
Pea soup says it much better.
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2 comments:
There is such a thing as "evening fog." Maybe the expression "thick as pea soup" can be used for that, whilst the morning fog gets a more appropriate phrase like "thick as sausage gravy," or "thick as grits."
Interesting point. Indirectly that was what I was going for. I suppose in England, where it's called London Fog, time of day is irrelevant. But for many of us in the states, fog is a biproduct of the morn. I like "thick as grits". It has that same unknown variable to it like pea soup.
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