New York City to Maplewood, New Jersey, and Environs to New York City, May 19, 2016

★★★★ The early light in the city was the color of the sidewalk. It was too humid to be cool and too sunless to be warm. Haze lightly coated the landscape all around the highway. In the clearing at the trailhead, the sun was beginning to come through. Mugwort was flourishing where the trail began, and poison ivy was flourishing after. Chipmunks and maybe other small things made sharp movements in the leaves, darting away. Something else rustled without ever leaping, a snakelike sound. Joggers passed on the paved road separately and individually, each wearing the same shade of pink. On the way back out of the park, a robin fledgling lay headless in the dry gravel. The sun grew full and bright, interrupted by passing clouds thick enough to be gray in their middles. Under the clouds, it was too cool to keep the light jacket off, and under the sun it was too hot to keep it on. But once the afternoon had subsided behind the trees did perfect comfortableness settle in. It was ease itself to stroll from the suburban houses to the suburban downtown, past the deep and thick grass. Two deer, pale tan near color of old bone, grazed in a front lawn no distance at all from the sidewalk. It took some searching, back in the city, to find a star in the sky.