Casual

...Adams exit had brought it to mind...

...Some of the steeples are uncannily like the cluster of steeples and turrets on the corner of Eighth and Plum in Cincinnati, where City Hall, St...

...it had appealed to them because it looked so much like another New Zealand seaport— Wellington—where Dad was working at the American embassy...

...Adams, the hilltop neighborhood of Cincinnati where we lived...

...A crescent moon casts a wavy luminescence across the sky...

...It is, indelibly, Chanctonbury Ring, the ancient druid grove on the Sussex downs, still in its glory during my stay in Sussex, long before the great storm of 1987 destroyed many of its trees, back when my late mother-in-law was living on the campus of the University of Sussex...

...he exclaimed...

...Just once, someone seemed genuinely taken with it...

...What a stunning picture...

...As I've studied it these seven years, I've been intrigued by the dainty signature— "Rona Dyer 1958"—and tried and failed to find out anything much about the artist from the Internet...

...Adams...

...I wasn't a seasoned driver back then, and that ramp never failed to give me an instant's terror that the car would go flying out into the darkness and down into the water...

...On the black hills, there are lights indicating roads and buildings, and at the foot of the hills, brighter lights and bigger buildings, some with towers and steeples...

...Mom and Dad had bought it in the late 1950s...

...That was right about the time I moved into this office, where my Dunedin print hangs on the wall and I can see it while I'm working...

...Years later, she acquired a necklace that . . . but it's a complicated story...

...CLAUDIA WINKLER...

...Then in the mid-1990s when one of my sisters moved, the clutter in her garage yielded up my picture of Dunedin...

...I've also noticed some details I'd previously missed...

...We'd take a road called Columbia Parkway out of downtown to the east, along the Ohio River...

...Very occasionally a visitor to my office comments on my harbor scene...

...Once when we were on that ramp at night, and my heart skipped the habitual beat, I commented without thinking, "This exit always reminds me of New Zealand...

...I saw at once why the Mt...

...But it mysteriously failed to turn up among the books and furniture shipped out to me in Cincinnati, where I was living then...

...My friend lives on another continent now, but his annoyance has taken its place among the picture's permanent associations...

...Then on the horizon, breaking the smooth silhouette of the hills, is a single grove of trees...

...That thrilling instant used to remind me of Mom and Dad's print...

...My daughter, who was with me, made an inspired choice of frame: not gold, but silver, and ornamented so as to catch the light and echo subtly all those finely hatched halos...

...The picture, which is almost square, consists of three horizontal bands—sky, land, water—each essentially black, but spattered with white and yellow light...

...Her apartment made a perfect base for our downs walks...

...And I said, "Yes, isn't it...

...Anyway, near the middle of the picture is a wide road, brightly lit, going up the hill...

...The moon and all the city lights and the lights on the ships have halos, multi-tiered and intricately hatched, and these too are reflected on the water of the harbor...

...The whole effect is animated, in a manner reminiscent of Charles Burchfield's ecstatic renderings of nature, or even—I've always thought, though it's a bit of a stretch—of my childhood favorite, Van Gogh's "Starry Night...

...I used to think of it at night, driving home to Mt...

...Just where the land and water meet are two big ships, brilliantly lit, and the harbor in the foreground is a dazzling swirl of undulating reflections...

...So I dusted off the print, its glass cracked and frame broken during its long neglect in the garage, and took it to the framer...

...I loved the picture, for its own sake, and for its evocation of New Zealand...

...The remark annoyed the friend who was driving, who apparently took it as an unprovoked display of geographic one-upmanship...

...Halfway up, it takes a hairpin turn to the left—a lot like the turn in the ramp over Columbia Parkway to Mt...

...The first exit was ours, a right-hand off-ramp that seemed to jut out high over the Ohio, before turning sharply left, across the parkway and up the steep hill...

...And its absence rankled...

...Peter's Cathedral, and the Plum Street Temple all stand, and which I used to watch for at the end of Eighth Street as I'd walk downtown from my office along Main...