New York City, November 15, 2015

★★★★ The eight-year-old put on a sweater over his pajamas after getting up. Scarves and knit hats were out in the sharpened cold and sharper sun. Earflaps. The wind rolled a paper plate along a crosswalk on edge. Fountains were dry. An afternoon walk up the avenue was led by a shadow long enough to bridge an entire storefront. A woman came walking sunward in a high-collared coat of pure primary yellow, a color not seen or not yet to be seen anywhere else on the sidewalks. As the sun went down, the last bit of its disc warped into a coronet atop a distant building. Over dinner the four-year-old told the eight-year-old about the sunset, and he learned that the eight-year-old in turn had seen the moon — a waxing crescent — in the dark walking back from his piano lesson. A peek through the blinds just to check found the moon at once, gone from now from white to gold, above the new construction on the far West Side.