Excursion.

Because I have not been outdoors all day, I dream that in the morning I might zip my boots, wrap my scarf tight, start up the car, and make my careful way through the shallow snow, out over the curving highway, out beyond the hoarse stubbled fields and the somnolent windmills, to that quiet site where every building is the same shade of green: darker than a watertower, lighter than a forest, slicked and slapped over house and barn and outbuilding and toolshed and outhouse, over even weathervanes and lightning rods. But I have known people who've gotten stuck out there, who've needed the help of strange strong men to extricate themselves from the world's rapid blanking, the roads' disappearance, the settling into the silence of cold.