'til November

It's mid-November, and the weather reflects it. A steady drizzle of rain hits the snow like acid, burrowing into the pockmarks and emerging in gray streams of slush on the city streets. Evening's coming and everything's gray, monotone, shadowless, as you're driving toward the Spit with a camera that only has one shot left on it. You're heading due south on the narrow strip of land, so you scarcely notice the sun slipping below the cloudline into the thin sliver of clear sky to the west. You don't have time to notice because the change is instantaneous anyway - as sudden as a camera flash, the distant shoreline erupts in a magnetic shade of turquoise you never even imagined existed in nature. It startles you so much that you pull over that second, like one of those finger-waving tourists that just spotted a the hindside of a bear, and you get out of your car, and take that one picture. Then, when you look at the image reflected on the tiny camera screen, washed of all its color and surprise, it almost breaks your heart, but not quite.