In a place far removed from here it was a warm late summer afternoon. The golden landscape was beautiful and peaceful. There were gently rolling hills sloping up from the sea to the west towards higher ground miles to the east. The sea was perhaps a mile away. It was calm and its color was aqua blue close into shore and sapphire blue towards the distant horizon. Off to the south, many miles away, a few puffy white clouds moved slowly across the sky. The sky was clean and luminous, light blue near the horizon, darkening towards the zenith. The sun was a golden orb, a third of the way down into the west. A few hundred yards to the east, there was a hilltop crowned with gnarled, ancient pines and ruins. The ruins were perhaps those of a farmhouse and had been there for centuries. This was a place without any real time. It was always the same and always different. To the north, many miles away, were rugged mountains, made blue and indistinct by the late summer haze.
On a nearby hilltop, there were about thirty cypress trees, which formed three quarters of a circle. They had always been there. The open part of the circle faced the sea. Inside the circle placed at the points of the compass were four weathered stone benches.
On the bench facing out to sea sat a lovely, dark haired woman. She was staring with great concentration into a glass of white wine which she was holding. She had a soft, amused smile on her face. A ray of light caught the wine and it glowed as if it were infused by a light from within. Her smile widened as she gazed. Clearly she had seen something intensely amusing in the glass. A sketchbook leaned against the bench beside her, but she ignored it. Her focus was on the wine glass and what she saw in it.
She was looking back upon a place she had been once, though it had no pull on her now. She was browsing through a few days in the lives of people she had once known very well. She saw a man in his shower with a small bottle in his hand and lather in an odd place. The man looked intensely annoyed and uncomfortable. That made her laugh out loud. She swirled the wine in the glass. She saw an office where she once worked. The inhabitants looked distant and not quite fully realized, but she was able to see that many of them were scratching themselves in intimate places. She shook her head in mock exasperation. Clearly they all had the same problem. She swirled her glass again, a little more slowly, and there was the same man she had seen in his shower now fully dressed walking away from the others in the office.
"Oh Jack," Claire said softly, "you never could keep it in your pants, could you? That was always one of your worst problems." She tilted the glass and took a few more sips, deciding that she would take her pad and go further down the hill to sketch. She stood up, a gentle ocean breeze catching her hair. Still chuckling, she finished her wine and put the glass on the bench. "Some things never change." she thought. "Especially Jack." She made her way slowly down the hill to the sea. It had been a long time since she had looked back to that place, and it would be longer still before she looked back again. Maybe she never would.