I grew up somewhere so flat you could watch weather arrive from twenty minutes away, a storm was a visible event you tracked across the whole sky before it reached you. Asheville took me a solid year to adjust to, not because the hills are hard exactly, they are, my calves apparently disagreed with me for a full winter, but because the weather here doesn’t announce itself the same way. Fog just fills the valley some mornings like the town got quietly poured full of something, and you don’t see it coming, you just wake up and it’s already there.

I moved for the job, the press had an opening and I was ready to leave the town I’d been in since undergrad, and I didn’t think much beyond the practical calculus of it, better position, better city, a real raise. What I didn’t factor in was how much the actual physical shape of a place ends up dictating the shape of your evenings. Flat land makes you feel like you could always go somewhere, the horizon’s right there, available. A valley closes in a little, especially once fog sits in it, and I noticed within that first year that I was staying in more, reading more, which I didn’t experience as a loss so much as a very specific gift I hadn’t asked for and wasn’t sure yet what to do with.

The forty-minutes-before-bed reading habit I’ve mentioned before actually started here, not before, which surprised me looking back, I assumed I’d always been that kind of reader and the move just gave me more time for it. It didn’t. Ohio-me read in bursts, weekends mostly, whenever. Asheville-me reads every single night on a schedule I never consciously set, and I genuinely think it’s the fog’s fault, some part of my brain decided a valley full of low cloud at seven in the evening is a signal to stay put and open a book rather than a signal to go anywhere.

Callum grew up somewhere with actual ocean fog and insists mountain fog isn’t real fog, it’s just cloud that got lost, which is the kind of argument we have now instead of bigger ones, and I’ll take it. Six years in, I still stop on the porch some mornings just to watch it sit there in the valley before it burns off, which is not a thing flat-land me would have understood wanting to do.