I was drinking coffee in the gray dawn gloom of the kitchen at Spencer Alley on Friday morning. And as I gazed idly out the window toward the western horizon, a shaft of sunlight shot (from back in the east behind me) underneath the cloud cover, causing a single ocher roof line within my field of vision and the few red leaves left at the top of a tall maple about a block away to suddenly blaze with color. This effect lasted for maybe three or four minutes and then abruptly vanished. All the rest of the whole day was dark and monochrome and sunless.
