Piece that begins and ends with partial listing of season-specific sensations

Knuckle skin cracking from dry winter air; lips a mess

Smell of car heater air mixed with chlorine smell coming from me, after lap swimming, wet hair under my hat stiff brushes sticking to wool of hat

White, white light—so diffuse, is it seeping in at the horizons? Whole sky one cloud sweater. Then all light pinkish at night before blue, and then total black, save lights from the refinery, like a carnival cruise ship come in to dock in the middle of town, white spume and Olympic torch, nude fire blast like fog horn

Total dearth of street lights. Blank windows like black paintings on our walls. Inside house at night, lights out, coffee table vs. shins

Most corn fields in sight from the road hacked down to stubble, but tractors still float past at morning intersections. Picking through New Year’s this year

Smell of fully melted pumpkin seeping over my desk

Shock and then even a little anger at mini, inflatable holiday nativity scene tethered, like hot-air balloon, to the courthouse lawn of our town. Then amusement at sight of it in daytime, deflated. (How seriously can we take these culture wars?)

Also inflated penguins sliding atop inflated mailbox, waving letters to Santa in the direction of the post office, courthouse south lawn

Winter branches, first top-frost of snow, grass blades and mud still poked up through; neighbor kids on their trampoline bouncing the shards of an ice puddle

Whole dead deer on highways, backs twisted acrobatically

Coming to full stop at a desolate country four-way, accelerating again all the way back up to highway speed

Letter to the editor: Our Christmas spirit needs revitalized. We’re the only town with no Christmas tree? And those same old wire snowflakes.

Christmas office party treats made with Eagle Brand, Tostitos Queso, marshmallows. I make a dessert with Vanilla wafers.

Trips through many towns, all the way to Iowa for Thanksgiving, up to Wisconsin and Minnesota for Christmas and New Years. One wonderful absence from list of seasonal sensations: airports. Anything airport related. Motoring (still, with our Oregon plates) through towns with names like Oblong, Eureka, Montezuma, Mount Pulaski, each with its own water tower, grain elevator, church steeples, Dollar General. At every town entrance, proclamations of local high school greats: division-clinching girls’ softball program; state champion football team; a pole vaulter, a wrestler. Along the main streets, names of more young people, each nailed to its own telephone pole with a yellow ribbon.

Invitation to a living nativity stuck in our back door. Will there be live donkey? Someone’s real baby? We are actually curious and want to go, but fall asleep on our couch.

When we visit the main streets—Story City, Iowa; Palestine, Illinois; Vincennes, Indiana—we get the feeling shop owners are calling ahead to one another down the line, letting them know we’re coming, though we’re really not buying much of anything. In Vincennes, we are given free peanuts in a newspaper cone, and organ music is piped out over the sidewalk. T buys a cast iron pot, and the clerk teases me: Now what will he want me to cook? Even the small PC repair shop seems to be in the antique business, even the record store, where the gray-ponytailed clerk/owner ambitiously offers to mail me a copy of the Dylan Christmas album on Tuesday, once it comes in (which he does, though not after calling me on Monday to assure me it’s coming). A woman in a thrift/Antique store has set up a murder scene from a famous play we do not know, but which once appeared at the local theatre currently being restored, she told us as if we knew all about that theatre. There are antique gun and blood and poker chips and liquor bottles on an antique bed. She has also turned off the heat in the shop. We drift through with our hands shoved under our armpits, searching for something we can pay her for. Her inventory includes remnants of her real life. She jokes about how she inherited the china in the glass case from an in-law, earning the set after decades of hand washing each piece after holiday gatherings, never breaking a one. Of course she’s the last one living of that clan too. That, she reflects, is also why.