New York City, June 4, 2014

★★ The blue jeans had to be intercepted on their way into the wash; they would have festered in the saturated air had they been hung up to dry. Birds made a racket in the plantings. The sun pressed down. The air conditioning was broken on the nearest 1 train car. Up on the street again, the gaze turned not just down from the overhead glare but inward, toward the buildings, away from the miniature suns reflected in the parked cars. The shade under the trees was correspondingly intense in its shadiness. Then came late afternoon, and all the contrast melted away to gray, so discontinuous with the morning it was as if a whole day had been lost sometime in the middle. An eyelid snapped closed just before a piece of crumpled litter came blowing up the subway steps, scoring a painful direct hit.