New York City, April 8, 2014

★★★★ Through the cool morning drizzle and mist, the shoe-repair shop was already showing an OPEN sign, ready to sell a replacement shoelace for the first-grader’s earlier replacement shoelace, which had already exploded into parallel strands at one end. A thin film of water covered the concrete of the schoolyard, where a gravely misplaced earthworm slowly and intermittently twitched, first one end and then the other. The rain stopped; the partly built new scaffolding around the building kept its share of sidewalk damp well after the rest had dried out. The sun came through, and the clouds, now separated, formed a pixelated clouds-and-sky image in the north face of the glass apartment tower. The descending sun was joined by a second sun flaring white off a Trumpville building. Curving wisps of pink spread across the upper western sky. Far off and low down, the underside of a skinny purple cloud lit up in searing reds.