New York City, September 26, 2013

★★ The ceiling of early clouds looked solid, but downriver in New Jersey there were sunlit buildings. For a few hours, autumn’s progress was diverted into a humid spring morning, too damp to bundle up against without sweating. The clouds thinned to blue in spots in the west, then cleared out past the zenith, leaving only the east blurred and gray. But the afternoon was cloudy again, and colder. Uptown, light hit the subway entrance, but failed to achieve any greater purpose. The sky was noise: open blue patches, ugly yellow gray over Midtown. It took the sun’s descent to clear up the dissonance, resolving everything overhead into trusty symphonic harmony, purple, gold, and pink.