Six in the morning, on the path up the hill behind the house. The grass had grown knee-high on both sides of a track barely a foot wide, and I was soaked before I had gone twenty steps. Something cold wrapped my ankles at every stride.
Korean has a word for a path like that: 이슬받이, iseulbadi. It also means the person walking it.
If someone has gone ahead, the grass is already bent and the dew already shaken loose, and you come through much drier. The iseulbadi was always the work of whoever went first — whoever left for the fields before light, whoever walked ahead of a child on the road to school.
In three days it would be 백로, baengno, white dew: the point in the old almanac when dew starts to settle white on the grass.
Coming back down, my pants were dark to the knee. I stood in the sun a little while and they dried.