Sun alone.

When you have successfully delivered an illustrated lecture about research you did a week ago, and when someone tremendously famous in your field has attended it and responded enthusiastically, you will take the rest of the afternoon off, wander around, buy unexciting needful things, enjoy the fact that the town has hushed itself softly in the first real cold. You will carry your calm all around you. You will watch the geese dropping one by one into the river, swimming one by one in a line, heading upstream.

When you walk out again, it will be dark and colder, frost on the cars, frost on the lawns, stars high and clear like the first thread of violin that will sound over the top of the crowd before the concert begins, strong and thrilling like the sounds that move you even more now that you're making them again yourself.

Coming home, you will see the river steaming. You will see Orion rising huge above the spires you love.