By Grand Central Station I sat down and pulled out my camera…

…no weeping whatsoever. A passerby mumbled “That’ll be a beautiful shot.”

I was well-dressed, I had dined on the company and I’d been flogging my brain all day, so that it felt loose now and light. I dropped my colleagues at their hotel and walked to mine, through this luminescent fog, deliciously cool.

Manhattan in spring is always a few weeks ahead of Toronto, and so my visits there are touched with wonder and disbelief. (They have forsythias already?) And in between meetings I buy coffee and walk on Fifth Ave because that’s the part I know best, and I greet the library even if I don’t have time to go inside, and I photograph the buds on trees and the stately shop-windows.

And I come home through turbulence and we bank down close over the lake and I see my own city, a smaller jewel. And everyone on the plane is a famous actor or a model. And I call my husband from the ferry; and he is glad.

And through the following week at the office, I stealthily add to my aluminum notebook all the thoughts and thoughts and thoughts. If only I were immortal or could forget the press of time.