We've been out, my wife, Deborah, and I, in the car.

Election. Deflection. Insurrection. Misdirection. Vaccination.

The words come at us like a hot wind that withers everything growing.

I'm retired, but I still work a little. She still works full time, and we go about our business covered in masks and sanitizer, wounds scraped in our skin from sand blown by that wind that won't stop blowing. America is a Dust Bowl of the soul right now, everything blowing away.

But we've been out, in the car, in the dark, together.

My parents used to go out. Not to parties, seldom to dinner, but to the grocery store, to the mall to look at furniture places and to other nonevents.

Deborah is a Realtor, and I went along with her to an open house, "for company," she said.

And it was dark out, and I was cold because this is New England, and there was snow on the ground because this is New England.

"Do you want to come with?" she said to me the night before. "I'll buy you a burger on the way back so you can start writing your column as soon as we get home."

I waited for her in the car while she did her Realtor business.

"I'm so glad I got into real estate," I said when she got back in the car, and she laughed.

And we drove home, some eight or 10 miles, our car a dim bubble of light on a secondary road lined with places to get coffee, places to get your oil changed, places to buy beer, big-box stores and the brave little hair salons of one-woman capitalism.

You can believe it driving down a four-lane secondary road in the dark on a Wednesday. You can believe nothing's changed, that people don't hate each other over lies, that the generally quiet America of my youth is still watching television and looking forward to going out and looking at furniture sometime next week.

The burgers were eaten in the parking lot of a McDonald's not too far from our house, a parking lot we've eaten in far too many times in the last year when we wanted to go "out" but didn't want to get sick.

When we'd eaten, we walked across the parking lot to a liquor store so she could browse the wine, and she bought a bottle, and I bought a little bottle of Irish whiskey, the size they give you on an airplane. It's a modest amount of whiskey, good in modest times when you're going to write when you get home, and you'll want a warm treat when you get done. I'll take the whiskey with hot water, a way of drinking whiskey that died sometime in the early 20th century.

Two people walk into a liquor store, a blonde and a man wearing plaid, the joke begins.

There is no such joke. The experience is more like a song, the waltz of "out" on a cold night when there won't be oysters on the half shell at a restaurant that calls itself a "dining hall," and there won't be drinks at a bar that calls itself a "taproom." It's a windblown, sand-scraped year.

My parents would come home from "out" with the cold smell in their coats, and love in their jokes, dancing that waltz.

We danced it too tonight.

I often say that isolation and boredom during the pandemic won't show if your wife loves you, but it will damn sure show you if she likes you, which may be more important, or at least more important day to day.

We went out, and we came home with the cold smell in our coats, and a little heartburn from burgers eaten too fast, and it was wonderful. If we don't die, we're going to be all right.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon, and for Nook, Kindle, GooglePlay and iBooks.

Photo credit: Hannes215 at Pixabay