Some years ago, I bought a landscape painting at the Rittenhouse Square art show. The painting is medium size, about 24″ by 32″, and it has a very simple composition: Sky, horizon, glimpse of a large body of water reaching into the distant horizon, dark trees on the right hand side, smaller trees on the left, with a diagonal green hill tilting toward the left. It has the slightly waxy palette of acrylic, but it also has the happy blue-and-green enameled finish of a sophisticated children’s book illustration.

Until yesterday, the painting had a big flat gilded frame around it, five inches or so all around. The frame came with the painting when I bought it.

For a long time, the landscape sat opposite my husband’s enormous flat-screen television in the living room, providing a visual weight to counter-balance the implacable sullen glare of the screen. But since my husband died, I have been getting rid of things that were a compromise between the two of us, and the television went a long time ago. Then the painting started looming.

It loomed even worse after I rearranged my furniture, the other day. I started to fret about it. Then, yesterday, I took the frame off, and suddenly everything could breathe again in the house.

That’s good, because that painting is a picture of some kind of heaven, and I didn’t want to lose it.

Over the verge of the hill, you see, down at the bottom, there is a shore. It could be a sandy beach, a river’s edge, or a lake border, but there is a sheltered beach down there that is warm and sunny in the summer morning light, with water lapping against it. I can get to the shore if I clamber down the cliff path (or the thick steep pasture), just the other side of the hill out of sight.

And off to the right and behind me, out of the painting, there is a big white clapboard house with a wrap-around porch, tall open windows letting in a summer breeze, and stairs that creak when you go up and down them. I can go sit in an Adirondack chair on the porch and look at the water, with a book open on my knee. I can drink coffee and just think about climbing down the hill to the water’s edge.

My grandmother’s place in the country had hills like that, and trees like that. There was a stream, if not a beach, at the bottom of the hill, and at the top of the hill was a big house with porches and high windows, though the house was clad in stone, not clapboard.

But the beach in my imagination comes from somewhere else, from a shore town I have visited all my life, and also from the Mediterranean seen in Normandy, the Hudson down from Fort Tryon Park, or even the Schuylkill River I can see when I walk along the top of a hill in Fairmount Park.

Though it’s a landscape painting, it’s not a painting of a place at all, not really. It’s a moment in time, a moment that lasts forever. I never actually have to go down that hill or back to the house. I can just stand there, looking and planning, any moment now, to begin a whole life in that spacious and solitary world.

Maybe there’s a boat moored at a dock down there. Maybe I can get in that boat go out to the horizon, even though I don’t sail, or in fact use boats at all. That’s not the point. Any moment now, I’ll go down the hill and get in. Any moment now.