We had some lovely fog during this week. Dreamy but driveable, as I call it: enough visibility on the road to see where you were going, with enough atmosphere to make everything seem otherworldly. As I’m wont to do, I gallivanted through the local forests with my camera, enjoying myself. I couldn’t do it too much, because duty called. In my case, my current duty is to purchase materials and supervise the ongoing restoration work at our country estate: an old Saxon fortified church and parochial house in Magarei, built during medieval times, now in sore need of loving care. So as I was driving back and forth between Mediaș (known in Saxon as Mediasch) and Pelișor (known in Saxon as Magarei), I’d park the car on the side of the road and run off into the forest, camera in hand, clock ticking on my wrist, spend 10-20 minutes hopping over the molehills (there are quite a few of them this year, just about everywhere around Magarei), take my photos, take a few seconds to listen to the sounds of the forest, which are lovely this time of year, then I’d run back to the car to see to my work. Only a few birds have begun to sing among the trees, so what I mostly heard were the sounds of water droplets (fog condensate) falling onto last autumn’s foliage on the ground. It was a lovely sound, a muted sort of “mpphhh” that punctuated the fog-muffled silence of the forest, and since I love silence and hate man-made sounds, it was quite perfect.