Fierce as the Baltic sea

It is my birthday. I am forty-four years old, the age some fictional character must be. I woke to a pair of packages, one from nineweaving that proved to be Vaughn Scribner's Merpeople: A Human History (2020) and from my parents which was a DVD of The Sea Wolf (1941). Hestia was a small black round of purr like an extra present at the foot of the bed. It is bright and brisk and cloudless as all the classical autumns outside.

All the trees carve shards of light

Since spatch's schedule blocks him from joining my birthday observed this weekend when my niece will be in town, it was important to him to take me somewhere nice on the day itself, and after some reconfiguration of plans based on parameters of pain, sleep, and sunset and some obstruction from construction and accidents on Route 2, we managed somewhere very nice indeed.

( Panoramas two-thirds sky and one-third land. )

We did not make it to the originally proposed bookstore: it was fine. We drove home down looping roads close-lined first with trees and then with malls as we made our way back from the Pioneer Valley into MetroWest. Fog drifted once across the highway from the marshes we were driving over. I looked for further meteors out the window through the least light-polluted hills and meadows, but saw mostly that I could still have read by the eighty-five-percent moon. It was a lot of time in the car and all worth it, an inland gift. It was, for everything going on in my life and outside of it, a good birthday.