The fog at the headland

There is a kind of fog at the headland that erases the boats one at a time, starting from the smallest. The dinghies go first, then the day boats, then the trawlers, and finally the freighter on the horizon goes too, and the sea is just a grey sound.

I used to drive out there with my mother when I was small. We did not talk. We were not that kind. We sat in the car with the window cracked and listened to the foghorn and ate sandwiches she had made wrong on purpose, with too much butter, because that is how her mother had made them.

She has been gone four years and I still go out there. I still crack the window. I make the sandwiches wrong on purpose. I am becoming, slowly, a person who carries her in small inherited gestures, and the headland is the place I am allowed to notice it.