I stood in the same spot where the big yellow and rusted bulldozers had come to rape the dirt and cut deep gouges and ruts in the soil, and I wondered why the earth didn’t bleed from such gashes.

The air was cold and tiny ice crystals burned and froze the inside of my nose. In silence I watched the dirty and abused world turn two-tone. The sky was gray and the trees were gray and the fields were gray. The house in the distance was white and the snow that fell from the sky was white and slowly and methodically the fields and my boots and coat turned white until me and all I could see and feel was a singular cold entity. A boy in pants wet up to his knee and frozen and a coat and the gray trees and sky and the world turned white.

The falling snow muffled the sound from the barn, the cows inside were as warm as a cow in a barn can be. And the snow covered the cow shit and for the first time I noticed that in this spot the world was silent, like death and I couldn’t smell the sweet grassy shit.

I stood there for a long time frozen and still. I stared at the white house through what had become an enveloping and consuming storm to a window that looked out toward the road. In a tiny corner of the front room of the house I saw someone had turned on the tree we’d brought inside last week and decorated with shiny things and the lights of blue and green and red made the window look like fire.

Smoke rose from the chimney and my frozen nose smelled the burning wood and I stood there motionless hoping I’d never move again and I’d never leave this place. But, for reasons not my own or my doing I left for a long string of days and now the bulldozers have come and the place I lived is dead.