Mercerville, New Jersey, September 17, 2012

★★★★ The sun, shining down from a sky smeared with white, angled into the gazebo as intended, fractioning the shade into portions of the sitter’s choosing. This was unexpected; it had seemed less a gazebo than a representation of a gazebo, pieces from a lumberyard assembled in gazebo form. But one could sit inside it, away from the daytime television of the waiting room, with the sun falling warm on one’s shoulder and neck, turning the pages of a hardcover novel in the shade. The emptiness of the gazebo was a given, like the emptiness of the paved walkways meeting in an inverted T in front of it. Each numbered suite along the walk with its own front door, one gable after another down the line. Grass clippings slowly baked to dryness on the pale concrete. A small, plain butterfly flitted over them. It might have been yellow, the topmost choice on a paint chip. A breeze blew down the stem of the T, along a uniform row of little trees standing in their off-center domes of mulch, and flowed through the gazebo. Shadows of wasps moved across the bench. Under the edge of the gazebo roof they were assembling a nest, the size of half a golf ball. They were hard-looking wasps, shiny, more black than yellow and with the yellow almost green. A groundhog the color of butterscotch loped along the dead tan-brick end wall, under the elevated mouth of the downspout, into the shelter of a mangy evergreen shrub. Uphill and diagonally across, in the shadow of the eaves, women in jewel-tone scrubs, holding cigarettes and smartphones, exclaimed and pointed where it had gone. A groundhog! The novel was proving extraordinary, as everyone had always said it would. Of course it was. The foam cup of waiting-room coffee was empty. At last, a sentinel wasp darted over and began pressing its claim, clear across the diameter of the structure and out the other side. There was barely time to grab the cup before going.