God only knows why, but you decide to surprise your sister on Christmas, and you set out, the pastel tread-tracery on your new tires turning prettily.  You drive several hours into unfamiliar territory, and then, MapQuest be damned, you can’t find the house.  But then you do.  You knock and you knock.

Just when you begin to lay into the door, at the next house a car drives up.   A man jumps out and begins to yell to you.  Almost out of earshot, he puts his whole body into the effort.  He tears off his gloves – for some reason he needs his hands bare to communicate with you – and flaps his gloves as he cries out.  Gone.  South.  For the winter.

You put your body into thanking him, a wave, hard with gratitude, and a deep nod (if you were in another place and time you would bow), and you step down into the beautiful new snow.  You take a sharp little turn to the back, really kick it up.  In the front the drapes are drawn, but maybe in the back you can see something through the big windows of the enclosed patio.

Yes, on the patio: a soft boy, toddler-size, dressed in black, has been stood in the corner.  He leans into the sharp angle, his face hidden.  His faceless face?  You’ll never know.  Your sister is one of these people who romanticize a culture, and then it dies.  On an Amish kick.  Still.  Baloney fried Trail.  Relentless, heartless (the torture) needlework, and the art of shunning.

Back in the car you sit there a few minutes with your eyes closed, listening to the radio but begin to feel cold and look up and find peering out the picture window of the next house three small children who look eerily alike.

You don’t have any loot on you, if that’s what they’re thinking.  Excuse me said like you don’t mean it, you are just leaving.

To your sister – as you back out – you say, I’ll see you.  When the cow comes home from freezing hell over.

You head toward what you imagine is the center of town.  Think you could do with a little bite to eat.  At the first traffic light, the colored globes shine in the bright sunlight like hard candies, and you try to remember what flavor green is until you realize you are stopped on green.  All you find open in this town is a gas station.  You buy gas and food and in honor of your childhood red pop and for the unexplored future berry crème you’ve never tasted.

Then in the car you dig into the plate of deviled eggs you’d meant for your sister.  So the heart will burst.  You get out your knife to tear at the package of tiny-holed, pale cheese (Happy Farms; you know those people aren’t happy).  You regret that the knife you have on you is not a Baby Swiss Army knife, but the package tears finally, and the cheese is good.

You drive slowly around town as you work on your Christmas dinner. 

The town, oh little town of mild vandalism.   You can’t believe your eyes.  You stop and back up a little way to park alongside a church nativity.  Mary and Joseph are turned to kiss each other, just like the Dutch girl and boy lawn ornaments at the next house.

You can’t remember the last time you’ve even come close to being kissed.

You think about your boyfriend, your he-male (you call him, though not to his face).  Last week you asked him if he thinks you have a soul.  NO!  The life went out of you.  Before long he’ll be wanting you to slow dance with him to Son House singing “Death Letter.”  Except yours is a relationship disembodied. You never see each other, not in three-dimension.  You make contact via the machine, at times both of you naked.     

You’d better move on before people get suspicious and come out and blame you for what happened at the nativity.

You know from a radio report that if you keep going north you’ll hit a wall of ice. At the next opportunity, when another state route crosses yours, you head west, the dashboard compass bobbling expectantly.

Less than a quarter mile you’ve left the town behind. 

A few more miles, and you see in front of a farmhouse a dead Santa stretched out, punctured inflatable. 

After that you give some thought to what is “the country look.”  The image pops into your head, you think about the real old-time country look: the old, old farmer hanging in the barn.

And: Would you really want to be dead now, a rusted barrette bent back and open and no little girl?

Here is a little church.  What you need is an outhouse.  You pull into the gravel lot and park and walk along the side of the church toward the cemetery.  Near a basement door in the snow lies a can of Redi-Whip.  You stare.   Probably Santa’s, for the reindeer.

You see right away, though, that the cemetery offers no restroom.  Here not a comfort station for the traveler in pain.  But for a few minutes, anyway, you walk in the cemetery, for the art and the reading material.  Such a sweet little stylized lamb.  “STILLBORN/ but not forgotten.”  Stone after stone the same surname.  So here you are in a community of dead Zooks.

            You remind yourself, you’d better remember why you came here; you’d better hurry up.  In the distance you can see, in this prairie (which you know at heart is a swamp), a great stand of trees offering shelter.  You turn off the main road onto a narrower one, then onto another one, even more narrow and slippery, that goes through the middle of the woods. 

You find a place to pull over at the blocked entrance of an unpaved service road and get out of the car, and begin your Christmas hike into mixed deciduous. 

On and on behind trees that are not good-sized and then into brush.  When you get caught up on twigs, you pause to wonder about the wisdom of heading into woods in a long crushed velvet skirt, (the hue “ashes of roses” – “one thousand and one crushed pleats make for a hundred and one excuses” – the catalog copy that sold you). 

Now you are, you at this point hope, entirely out of sight, and you pull up your skirt.  Maybe in the end you will be, after all, a debutante and surprise God with your upturned petticoat!

So here you are in the woods that three minutes from now (hour glass in miniature, egg timer, pink pink sands of life run out) you will discover – see a sign – is a camp, a scout camp.  So here you are now in an abandoned Girl Scout camp, new trail marked, an old woman’s urine in the snow.