Raf’s parents lived near here, on the farm where he grew up. “He used to be a tractor,” I said aloud. I didn’t want to visit the parents. There was too much Raf in Raf’s dad’s smile.

The northern horizon was sherbet green.

I passed storm-shocked trees that sprayed snow like aerosol, horses picking over the puddled land, barbed-wire fences covered with frizzled ivy, rows of broken brown corn stalks, a silver-capped water tower, a park with a hundred picnic tables turned onto their tops.

The evening sun put an oily finish on the snow. I saw spots when I looked straight at it—yellow, blue, magenta.

I drove by a roller rink with tilted skates for a logo, heaps of cut timber, the twin spikes of winking radio towers, a tidy prop plane on display to the road.

I passed a parched orchard, electric towers shaped like huge party dresses, a cluster of floodlights trained on a gorge, a white bowling alley blinking in the late sun, trees with rusty pine cones, fields of twisted weeds, crowd scenes of cattails.

And tires along the roadside; parts and strips and hunks, and some were whole.

The sky shook loose more snow.

Now I had an idea for a long poem on enantiotropy. Barny, the physicist, had talked about it. He said this is the method for something becoming its own opposite, which it does because of a critical pressure, usually; becomes the reverse of what it was or ever intended to be.

My car was hydroplaning. For a weightless moment it went airborne. The steering wheel lost command.

Now the radio speakers yelped as the car let down. I’d been narrating the episode, I realized; for no one, carefully detailing it aloud.

I guided off after a FOOD-PHONE-GAS sign.

An eighteen-wheeler, also exiting, raised rooster tails of slush that boomed onto my windshield. When my wiper blades stroked the water away, fixed ahead was a funny melting world: a building like a stone hunting lodge, people, dozens of squat and stout fuel pumps.

I was shuffling boot to boot inside a souvenir shop holding a cold phone receiver that smelled of lipstick and hairspray. I had it in mind to call my mom to tell her about the postcard and that Raf was or had been there in Wasnascawa.

“Shame, shame,” I was saying now, seated on a bent leg on the floor. I was in the position of a schoolyard marble shooter. My left palm stung. I studied the corrugated tread on my boot. Some people were watching me watch the boot.

“Oops,” a man said. “Still in one piece?”

I saw my canvas handbag a yard away. “What happened to me?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” said one of the watchers.

“I fell? I’ve never done that. I’ve never fallen down and not known it. I don’t remember falling.”

My left leg hurt, hip socket to knee joint.