For most of my life, I didn’t have a garden. The building I lived in had a back courtyard: high walls, gray concrete and rough kids I didn’t much enjoy playing with, one of whom, terrifyingly, once kissed me on the lips during some hide-and-seek game. I envied friends who lived in houses their private spaces, their windows giving onto shady patios, their Sundays.
Instead, I had a whole seaside resort for my garden during many childhood summers.
This place was limitless and yet ownable, its gravel streets as familiar as my own feet beating along them in flip-flops, carrying me towards the unpredictable beach.
My feelings for the eucalyptus grove behind our house were proprietorial: I hated the little trailer left year-long in its midst, closed into itself through the winter, inhabited in summer by a family I watched from the far end of our unfenced plot, daring them to set foot in it.
That grove felt deep and haunted in its sun-dappled quiet, like a fairytale forest. It has since become pitifully small to my adult eyes, albeit still lovely.
But it would be many years before I had my own garden, the “hortus conclusus” which in the Middle Ages came to mean the Virgin Mary and means for me sanctuary, a piece of sky all my own, a silence touched with birdcalls and rustling poplars.
A place to be in with a book, and at the same time to close my eyes and let the breeze play with my face.
And yet not even this, which is a lot, will prevent me from finding other places I’d like to inhabit. Which will as often as not be in paintings. Like this one by Friedrich, called “The Garden Terrace”, where a young woman (me?) is reading at the golden hour. 
Friedrich understood the blurry quality of the distinction between what is and what we feel as ours. The beautiful formal garden, we can assume, belongs to this woman or her family; the hilly land beyond it probably does not. And yet, is not all equally hers under the twilight glow? That delicate wrought-iron door, flanked by lions — what kind of a boundary is it, when she could so easily open it and step into the open land, head towards the sunset, never be seen again?
Uruguayan Blue 
Después de leer este post, permanecí un rato en un estado de ensueño, visualizando aquellos lugares donde me pude escabullir un rato con un buen libro o pensamientos… Esos lugares que te teletransportan sin escalas ni interrupciones (de hecho facilitan la transición)… Quisiera quedarme allí un buen rato.
¡Así es! ¡Lugares para permanecer!
Lovely, Laura…just lovely I had never heard of Friedrich.I enlarged the photo and it came to me beautifully…….Lowell
Thank you, Lowell. I came to Caspar David Friedrich through his incredible painting of a man standing on a rocky summit, surveying the sea of mists around him. Interestingly, I’ve seen that painting on the cover of both of Mary Shelley’s great novels, ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘The Last Man’, and another Friedrich painting on the cover of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft’s great piece of travel writing, ‘Letters from Norway, &c’. He is an artist definitely worth checking out.