New York City, June 30, 2015

★★★★ Now the sun bore down a bit, and the air in the park felt dusty. Starlings, one drab with new plumage, foraged in the clover and grass. Honeybees cruised low. A white stretch limousine, its rearmost window partway down, rolled to a stop outside the brassy Trump Internarional canopy. A sawdust smell rode the breeze up Lafayette. Out on the fire escape in the afternoon, the patch of sun went away and a chilly wind began blowing. A crow cawed loudly and flapped down to perch on a coil of barbed wire against the suddenly dark sky. The clouds thinned again, but there was still something damp and feverish on the air. The radar map on the phone couldn’t quite make the case against fireworks in Astoria. Some drops fell in the late Manhattan sun on the way to the subway. When the N train emerged in Queens, the light was dim and the wind tossed hair and branches. On the walk west to the park, orange rifts and a drifting mass of darker gray met in the big sky afforded by the ahuman scale of the expressway leading to the Triboro Bridge. Hip-high weeds pressed in on the edges of sidewalk. The lower clouds moved north so fast that the higher ones seemed to be moving in retrograde. Under the weight of the three-year-old, jumping and smashing down onto a supine body on the lawn, water seeped up through the blanket to dampen the back of the shirt. The ebbing light raised a few pinks and warm browns in the sky. The fireworks went up; now and then a raindrop came down. After the display was over, a yellow smudge opposite resolved itself into a blurry near-round moon, and then into a crisp one.