On a Saturday afternoon in urban McLean, Virginia, the streets are deserted and hardly any cars pass along an avenue which in most days is thick with traffic. This is an affluent town, and most of the people have gone away to their other homes or some form of vacation getaway. Meanwhile, the stores are nearly unpopulated and the golden light of a solstice evening slants across clear parking lots.

It's a surrealistic summer of space in a place where none of it is usually in evidence. I have fantasies of open space the way other people have fantasies of consuming or performing. I drive slowly through a quiet neighborhood at twenty miles an hour, looking at gardens and houses, with no one impatiently honking their horn behind me. High clouds drift across the sun with no hint of rain or turbulence.

I gaze at porches and wish I were sitting on one with a drink in my hand. I wonder whether I will ever get my wish, to live in an open space in a house with a porch. I had a porch for many years in Cambridge, Mass. but there was no view at all there, and I could barely see the sky. I saw plenty of such houses and landscapes last year in Maryland and Pennsylvania, so I know they exist.

Here on a lawn in a modest neighborhood (though it is being invaded by destruction and the building of oversize gross houses on small lots) is a vision of summer in the evening light. The gazebo is covered with netting to keep the insects out, in a kind of "oriental" drapery, reminding me of some Indian palanquin of pleasure. But there is no one in the gazebo, neither pasha or houri.

The solstice has passed, and the days will now slowly get shorter. In the southern hemisphere, they are getting longer. If only I could be like the arctic tern, which migrates from one end of the earth to the other following the sun. Is there any place on earth where gentle sunlight and green trees last all year? Perhaps there isn't, and such a landscape exists only in the secret gazebo of the World of Imagination.

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