New York City, September 8, 2014

★★★★★ The river was crushed-velvet blue. Broken, dry leaves blew in a cloud around the street sweeping truck. It surged ahead or sagged to a halt, as the cars did or did not scatter for it, its roar reverberating under the scaffolding. Being in the sun was a bit too warm, after the exertions of prying a clinging first-day-of-preschooler off one leg. Loose, white clouds were moving fast, northeast to southwest, making the higher cirrus look like it was in retrograde motion. Evaporative cooling was going on in the hollows of the elbows. Afternoon brought a gray sky with gray clouds under it in the east, and white clouds under gray in the west. The shops on Grand Street had their mooncakes out; a vendor by the subway stop was huddled in a pay phone with a handful of cheap plasticky American flags, a dollar apiece, reminding the passersby that 9/11 would be Thursday. Holiday season again. Up at 72nd Street, the leaves along the Park were turning over in the wind. Building decorations on Broadway were muted in the dull light but also somehow coextensive, for a moment, with the gray-tinted tossing branches on the median. The dinnertime sky out the window presented gorgeous white-edged gray clouds against blue, sustained for a while. Then: maximal sunset, spilling upward. Somehow the orange setting sun took a double or triple bounce to shine off the windows directly in front of where the sun’s disc would be, as if the light were piercing straight through the solid block of the apartment tower. A tiny corner of coral peeked above a rich purple cloud, and then hot pink slashes, and then multiple pinks, multiple grays, whites, golds — sharp forms here, a blurry rainbow haze down there. A tugboat came upriver through waters that were now pink.