THE TOTALLY CLOUDLESS sky continued, a blue chambray shirt after a thousand washings. The stillness made me uneasy. It was the rule in our part of Texas that weather was a sort of cosmic grandfather clock, each extreme followed by an equal pendulum swing in the opposite direction.

For example, the year Eben and I moved to Waco, with two toddlers, was the year of the worst heat wave on record. Sixty-three days that summer the thermometer registered over a hundred degrees; a hundred thirteen in Dallas. Then, when everyone had got back what was left of their soil, sorghum, skin, yards, rivers, lakes, the region was gripped in the “big chill,” the bitterest winter on record in the twentieth century, with fifty days of temperatures below thirty-two that froze solid winter crops, livestock, cisterns and ponds.

I was in hopes that the ferocious flash floods across central Texas did not mean a summer drought equal to that of the thirties, fifties and seventies. My house had ceiling fans but no air conditioning. I hoped the walls, thick because old, would provide insulation. But my worry was not for myself or the girls, but for the students I might be tutoring. Any kid, I figured, whose parent was paying one-on-one hourly rates for a good score on the SATs, was going to come from a house that went from cool to frigid in the summer months. It might be that I’d have to offer my sessions at Circleburgers. Not a bad idea, actually, getting the student into a friendlier, less academic atmosphere. A little jukebox wailing in the background.

In this frame of mind, then, I didn’t take it amiss when the next weekend a warm front rolled in on a fog the likes of which I’d not seen before. The girls and I stood in the yard, holding up our hands in front of us, amazed, truly, that we could not see them.

We joked that people should say potato soup fog instead of pea soup fog, as this looked a lot like what we were going to have for lunch.

I called Shorty, to give him a chance to bitch about missing out on his fishing, the river levels having finally fallen enough to set out lines again. I said it wasn’t foggy under the water, and anyway, if it was, the fish wouldn’t be able to see the hook, just those luscious goggle-eyes. He said it wasn’t the fish had to drive across the bridge.

It might be we all needed an excuse to lie low, stay in, do nothing. That the fog was weather’s way of redressing the griefs and damages of the previous weeks. A downy compress to bind the bereavements of May.