In July of 1992 time is like ice cream. I pick you up after I get off duty at the ambulance, and we drive south together on a narrow, straight road running between perfect corn rows. The trip seems to take a long time, and I realize it's because I've become accustomed to seeing it fly by in the wake of sirens and lights. I've forgotten what it's like to drive here if no one is dying at my destination.

The Dairy Queen is a little shack just off the corner of Rt 58 and Rt 20. In the winter it's shuttered and derelict. You would drive past it in January and believe it was closed forever, uninhabited for years save by stray dogs and the occasional determined hitchhiker willing to pry open a door for a sheltered place to pass the night. But the Dairy Queen is merely in deep hibernation, a profound coma from which it will slowly emerge when warmer days come again. Some time in April a man will pull the nails from the boards covering the windows, fix the damage done during the winter by local kids, hook up the electricity and gas, and replace the light bulbs. Picnic tables appear on the narrow concrete apron between the Dairy Queen and the edge of the roadway. The greenish sodium glow of fluorescents shines through the wide front windows.

By Memorial Day the Dairy Queen is restored to life. People file into the narrow inside space, like a glass-enclosed porch, to yell their orders through tiny windows at the young counter staff inside. Baskets of frozen fries sink into oil with a jet whoosh. Soft serve ice cream flows from burnished metal machines, swirling chocolate and vanilla onto chipped cake cones. Baskets of food -- fries and burgers wrapped in paper, ice cream cones plugged into little packs to keep them all upright -- is sent back out through the tiny windows to the waiting throng, and customers slide through the crowd to intercept their orders.

By late September, even the weekend crowds will thin out. On a Sunday night the Dairy Queen will have a two-cones-for-one sale, getting rid of excess stock. Some night that week the man will return to bleed out the water and gas lines, clean the machines one last time, haul the picnic tables off to storage, pull the fuses, and carefully hammer plywood over the front windows. To anyone who doesn't remember the summer, the Dairy Queen will appear abandoned, closed forever. Of course, by then I will have left. Perhaps you will drive by the shuttered, silent Dairy Queen some time later and think about today. Maybe I will always remember it bright and packed full in mid-summer.

In July, time is already on our minds. Everything beautiful hurts.

I do not remember the conversation we had as we sat out in front of the Dairy Queen. If you don't either, then it's lost. We linger there as dusk falls. I remember that as we got into the car I felt the precarious, syncopal tilting of the universe, everything sliding toward a distant edge.

I am pulling out onto the highway, but for reasons I will never understand, I brake and hesitate a moment. Without any warning a shape emerges from the night and roars past just beyond the front of the car, flashing briefly into form as it passes through the headlights. A motorcyclist, no headlight, going flat-out. The roar of his engine Dopplers off into the darkness and vanishes. We pause for a moment and breathe. If not for a moment's inexplicable hesitation on my part, he would have hit my side of the car broadside. My ambulance would have been dispatched, and my friends would have come in their swirling lights, with no time to watch the landscape go by. Someone could have died. Someone might have decided not to leave after all. Like a game, the universe tilts another way and everything on the board begins to slide towards the far end.

In September, the lights in the Dairy Queen are on one last time. The man sweeps the floor. The larger machines have been taken apart covered by tarps. The freezers are mopped out and the doors left open, the last faint breath of cool escaping into the unseasonable warmth hugging the surrounding fields, the last remains of summer.