The Maine coast is famous for its fog as it rolls off the ocean like an earthbound cloud, gray and misty and cool. The San Francisco Bay area is also known for its fog, especially when it envelops the Golden Gate Bridge in its ghostly embrace. But I read recently that the ocean fog of our Californian cousin – a vital part of its climate and culture – faces an uncertain future due to climate change.

This distressing news made me think about something happier – my mother, Kay (Lewis) Weidenfeld. Mom was born and raised in San Francisco, and the morning fog was an integral part of her daily life. She died of respiratory complications 10 years ago. It’s easy for me to remember her death date: March 6, 2012, or 3/6/12.

I wrote something about her years ago that I would like to share in a somewhat revised form, marking the 10-year anniversary of what I consider her premature death. She died at 77, for many a full life; but if not for four decades of smoking unfiltered Pall Malls – the internal fog that ruined her lungs – she likely would have lived longer. Here’s some words from the heart to mark her memory, and to remember her deep connection to Maine.

Now it’s my memory that’s foggy, but I do remember clearly that my mother loved Maine. Though her trips to the Pine Tree State were few and far between, they were always meaningful to her: A family marriage to attend, a rare chance to see her far-flung, eldest son.

A small part of my mother’s ashes now resides, oddly enough, in an 8-ounce Grey Poupon Dijon mustard jar that sits atop my bedroom dresser. The jar is right next to a small rock that I picked up when we spread my father’s ashes upon the ground of one of his favorite deer hunting sites. My parents divorced when I was 7.

Most of my mother’s ashes, at her request, were tossed into the cold ocean waters that constitute the San Francisco Bay. For her it was a kind of homecoming, a closing of her life’s circle. This event was attended by a tight group of family members and friends, gathered on a sailboat floating under a steel bridge.

My wife and I, on a longer trip down the California coast, took part of her ashes and deposited them under a tree on the Cal Poly university campus in San Luis Obispo, where she was born, and off the wharf in Santa Barbara, her favorite place on earth. I hadn’t planned on keeping any, but I did, perhaps unwilling to completely part with her. Seeing her ashes in a jar every day, I started thinking about what, exactly, I should do with them.

While Maine wasn’t the final resting place she asked for, I thought since this was a place quite special to her, she’d like to be, well, part of the scene. She loved the Maine woods, especially in the fall, and she loved the Japanese gardens behind our house. I could have logically placed her remaining ashes in either of these places. But the more I thought about her, and what she did when she visited us in Maine, I came to realize that maybe she was already where she belonged.

Mom was a homebody by nature, and the most self-sufficient person I’ve ever known. You never had to entertain my mother, she just took care of herself, always happy with her own company. So, odd as it was to have her last remains in a mustard jar on my dresser, maybe it was just the right place for her – close to me, my wife, and the old Maine house she loved. Today her ashes are still there, beside my father’s rock, close in a way they never were in life.

The poet Carl Sandburg penned a short poem about fog: “The fog comes / on little cat feet. / It sits looking / over harbor and city / on silent cat haunches / and then comes in.”

The poem is intensely visual, yet mysterious and metaphorical, seemingly about change. Everything changes. Accept it. It’s the fog of life, rolling in, rolling out.

Steven Price is a Kennebunkport resident. He can be reached at sprice1953@gmail.com.

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