Sitting in my favorite spot at Lighthouse Writers Friday 500, I give myself the gift of free writing, time to let my mind wander, to explore loose, sunset thoughts as Denver sinks into the gloaming.

What surfaces is an old dream scene, an Andrew Wyeth/Edward Hopper hybrid, a white farmhouse on a green slope, no trees, but a granite boulder just  to my right. If there is action, it’s geological, slow beyond my perception. The day is bright, the house distinct and clean, all its edges plumb and level. I am a quarter of a mile downhill from it, maybe less. It is not my house, not one I’ve ever seen awake. Certainly, it’s in my native New England, given the slope, the granite and the precise white house in contrast to the lush hayfield.

If a painter portrayed this landscape, she would show my back, and in perspective I would loom over the house. She would witness my silent watching of this house. I think she might paint me naked, thigh deep in green hay, an elderly female back, the buttocks and upper arms fleshy and sagging, skin marked with moles, her hair short and gray. Then, I wonder if there is a companion painting in which the woman’s body is firm and slender and the house is peeling and its windows cracked.