Aberdeen, Maryland, to New York City, September 20, 2015

★★★★ The glow of dawn, shrugged off in favor of more sleep, did not seem to have been much dimmer than the green glow of late morning through clouds and trees. Outside was clement and cool; the foliage tossed a little but no rain came. The grass or the things growing where the grass used to be made a dry field for wiffleball, sharp grounders bouncing irregularly uphill. A molting blue jay, more mangy gray than blue on top, flew to and from a feeder. Sun came on, and the low, soft plants in the deer-mowed understory of the woods glowed a vivid tennis-ball color. Along the highway, nature’s last greens had begun to burn to back to gold, with flares of incipient red showing now and then. Goldenrod burnished the shoulder. Horses in a field switched their tails. The light was painterly, in an austere photorealist manner. Some cornfields had gone over to a caramel color and others had gone the color of withered corn. Off the Turnpike in Elizabeth, fluffy globes of grasses in various earth tones clung like tribbles to an eroding dirt mound. A man and boy played catch with a football in the empty stretch of parking lot between the Ikea cars and the Toys R Us cars. The low planes seemed even more impossible than usual. The water in the swampy New Jersey approaches to the city was electric blue. The light was generous to container stacks, rusting highway railings, bad brickwork, and other follies of humankind. In the city a frisky breeze was blowing and the sky was smooth shades of lilac and violet.