New York City, December 7, 2015

★★★ Out the window downriver in the late-arriving dawn was a vision of Victoria Harbor, purple false mountains rising beyond the water. In the other direction, rather than solidifying the unreal, the haze was dissolving the ordinary landscape into luminous pink. Overhead was quietly spectacular cirrus: whorled or wind-pulled into sharp little bits that clumped and spaced like iron filings in a magnetic field, or wood shavings on a drumhead. One string of them had been dragged, somehow, into a full loop. It was too chilly to check the aging phone on the way back from the pre-K dropoff, for fear of driving the battery into its death spiral. The sun slipped between buildings and found a small tree, still in leaf and flame-colored, in the shelter of the north side of an apartment slab. The illusory mountains were just clouds again, and then the sky was clear.