There was something supernatural about fog, Silas decided, the way it hung unmoving, hiding things you should be able to see and changing things you thought you knew into something else. Oh sure, he knew it was just there now because the ground was half frozen and the temperature had risen above freezing, but some instinct deep in his spine made him feel like there was something more to it than just a dense cloud of water droplets close to the ground.

There was a different instinct in his knees, making him feel like he needed to get home and take some aspirin. Cold, wet days weren’t kind to him like they used to be. He was glad that Rosemary, sleeping in the passenger seat of the truck, didn’t have any of the aches he had. He always marveled at his wife’s good health and strong body, and thanked whatever god was listening that she'd been so blessed. Seventy-eight and still as active as when they first got married, she was maybe a little thicker around the middle, but he reasoned that there was just more of her to love now than there had been then.

She was sleeping soundly while he drove at half the speed limit with his fog lamps on, peering ahead of him at the country road for their turn. They’d spent the morning in town getting groceries and some supplies to mend a fence, but it seemed like it was going to take them the rest of the day just to get back to the farm at this rate. Every ten minutes or so, he suspected he’d missed their lane altogether and was ready to turn and go back, but then reminded himself that as slow as he was driving, he couldn’t have missed it yet.

Maybe it just felt further away than it used to, he reflected, just like the days and the years felt longer than they used to, now that their children were grown and moved away and raising children of their own, and most of the farm work was being done by hired help. He thought that when you got old, your life started to stretch thinner and thinner before it snapped off, and that was why everything seemed so much slower and further away and harder now.

He wished his kids would visit, or at least call or write more, but he could forgive them for having their own concerns to deal with. After all, he and Rosemary were still functioning well enough on their own, even if he did sometimes lock himself out of the house and had to write himself notes to remember to do things later. The kids had to raise their own kids and work their own jobs and run their own houses--with so much work, not much time was left for mom and dad, and he understood.

He wondered if his parents had felt this way. He wondered how his parents would feel if they knew he’d sold part of the farm or that his kids didn’t want to be farmers, that the whole property would probably be sold once he and Rosemary were gone, or if they knew that one of his sons was gay and he was okay with that. He wondered what his mother would have said when he and Rosemary went to visit the kids for the holidays instead of the other way around, or if his father would have reprimanded him for not attending church anymore, and for only half believing what they taught there anyway.

He wondered how he could have been driving for an hour, even at thirty miles per hour, and still not have reached his turn.

Any other day, he’d have woken up Rosemary or turned back. But then, any other day, he’d have been able to see where he was and he’d have been driving faster.

There was something about the fog that kept him from turning around and backtracking. Something about the opalescent void visible through the truck’s windshield and the curious way fog muffled the rattling of the old pick up kept him moving forward. If he turned back, he’d never be able to find out what lay ahead--if everything was really the same beyond his limited field of vision or if it had changed somehow while he couldn’t see it. Part of him, the part that was resigned to being old but not yet ready for the grave, wanted to keep on driving into the unknown forever with Rosemary.

“You can’t go back, anyway,” he remarked out loud, “no matter how much you want to.”