New York City, May 15, 2017

★★★★ The chill was only a chill; the gusts that lifted long hair straight up and pushed past the laces of the canvas shoes were as coolly gentle on arrival as they had been fierce in approach. The sunlight and the clouds were both fleeting, so that a step off a darkened curb led into a crosswalk so bright the stripes seemed to be lit from below. Grasses swayed in their plantings on the top of a hard new building’s metal canopy. The late light enlarged every grain of dirt by the shoes in the entrance hall. The after-dinner sky was so bright that the shadows in the forecourt looked like twilight by contrast. The leaves of the trees and bushes trembled and somewhere inside them the birds twittered with fervor, the sound throbbing in and out of phase.