A Summer Country

What I need is a Summer Country.

You go in through one of these interdimensional portals, with Britt, your dog, at your heels.
A shimmer surrounds you. And there you are.

The sun is directly overhead in the blue sky. It's warm, but you just know it's going to cool off, come evenings. Cool off to sweater temperature.

The fields on either side are full of humming bugs and smells that send Britt coursing in the tall grass, tail flagpoled, nose to the ground. A dragonfly flits ahead of you. You follow the path down to the lake.

The cabin is gray wood, weathered by god-knows-howmany-years. Just one room. A big screened porch looks out over the rocks and the smooth water. The wicker chair has blue flowered cushions on it. There are loons out on the lake, and tonight the geese will fly over.

Britt clickclicks across the wood floor behind you, then finds the waterdish next to the sink. You put your laptop on the desk at the window. The plug on the extension cord looks funny when you pick it up, as if it were shifting. But then it's just the ordinary American two-prong. You know the electricity will be right, in the same way you know it'd be right for anyone else who came here, wherever they came from.

Lord knows how that half-sized refrigerator works. It's uncannily silent. There's tupperware tubs of food, upper shelf and lower, all topped with white labels. The writing is all caps, each letter drawn, not written, as if somebody didn't use this alphabet often. In the door of the fridge, bottles of coke are lined up -- the old green kind of bottle that they don't make any more.

The bed in the loft has feather quilts.

You know, however long you stay here writing, it'll be two o'clock on Thursday afternoon when you climb back up that hill and walk through the portal again.

You let Britt out to explore -- there's nothing in these woods and fields that can hurt her -- and sit down and start working.