New York City, November 23, 2014

★★★ The trip to the supermarket for milk and breakfast ingredients was chilly but only chilly, the sun glowing through fissures in the sheet of clouds. Then the clouds separated further and were overlaid with contrails, collage-work in the west. Haze shone downriver. The afternoon’s mildness made a promise that the early sunset threatened to revoke. There was a rustic smell of fallen leaves on the air, and now some trees were wholly bare — one strung with holiday lights, one dangling with lumpy blue-black seed pods. Children stayed on the playground late into the twilight, though it was still early in the evening.