Foliage

God, I miss autumn on the east coast. Driving up here from New York yesterday I wanted to keep pulling over and taking pictures of the sky, the wisps of cloud, and the gold and red and orange trees that make the hills look like they're wrapped in quilts. And it's cool but not cold, and the air smells like autumn. Sigh. Me so eastern.

NYC was too brief, but good. In addition to crashing with claireeddy and having the World's Yummiest Pork Stew (I'd ask for the recipe, but Claire, like me, cooks as much by inspiration as anything else, and I'm not convinced I could replicate it), I had lunch with my editor and talked book, had a lovely dinner with tnh and pnh and their staunch and adventurous hamster Hiro Frumentius, and spent three hours at the hospital visiting baldanders and giving roadnotes a chance to go chase down people she needed to talk to. He looks both more and less "stricken" than I expected--he doesn't look diminished in the way that sometimes happens, but he's in a bed in a hospital with annoying things strapped to him. Every now and then he'd get a look of supreme annoyance (the same face he used to make, when working at Tor, when he'd just had to talk to some consummately unhelpful or stupid person); and while I'm not sure he always remembered who I was, he and I agreed that we were both really, really frustrated with our inability to express/intuit what he wanted t say. For a word-wrangler this is a hard, hard handicap. roadnotes is--or appears to be (which is quite different)--calm, patient and loving with him, and knows what a long-haul this is going to be. I'm glad they've got such a tribe of loving friends around them.

So: now I am in Massachusetts, on the internet, but looking out my hotel window at the naked birch tree surrounded by gold and deep red and green foliage. I'm not your nature-oriented person--I really really love cities, the more arching and congested the better--but you'd have to be a rock not to enjoy this. Two crows are having a discussion in the arms of the birch--now one has gone off to accomplish something. In an hour I pick up my aunt and we go down to see my father's show and watch him be lionized (which I suspect he will very much enjoy). I will take pictures.