ANOTHER TREE FELL. It was on our block, just around the corner, a Tilia americana, known as an American basswood or American linden. Approximately 105 years old, it stood some three or four stories tall, and crushed our neighbors' car when it fell, but thankfully does not seem to have damaged their house. In July a number of trees on the surrounding streets succumbed to the extreme weather that bashed through our village. I saw one tree that had snapped right at the base, its roots still firmly in the ground.

I'm writing this on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. It's not much fun to reflect on the past year. Nor is it particularly fun to contemplate the year to come. Lately Michaela has started to ask all sorts of metaphysical questions at bedtime. My answers are crumby. I try to remember what it felt like the first time I realized how vast the universe is, how infinitesimally small we humans are in comparison, but I've kind of grown numb to bigness. I'm increasingly awed by minutia, by how a tiny seed can grow into, well, into a 80-foot-tall tree.

Oddly this is not the first time donuts have taken on interdimensional properties in my comic diaries.

Three Things That Kept Me Going This Week

1. Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. Michaela was riveted by this young-adult novel, which I'd never heard of, though it was a best-seller and our edition included a new preface written by Stead in honor of the book's tenth anniversary. I was impressed by the empowering tone of the preface, and when Michaela finished the book I read it to see just what had enthralled her. It's a pretty wonderful, big-hearted book, set in the early 1980s, with a puzzle at its center that unfolds so beautifully that I hesitate to give it away by revealing too much about the plot. Suffice to say that the physics of time-travel are explained at one point in terms that even I could understand.
2. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos. I keep describing this novel, which won the International Booker Prize, as the counter-argument to John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (which I love). Kairos isn't a defense of communism or East Germany, but it definitely is not interested in upholding any Western capitalist savior narratives. The plot is driven by a May-December love story and the older dude-lover is a convenient transmitter of Cold War history, though, to be perfectly frank, I found the affair to be tedious to the point that I skimmed those scenes in order to get back more quickly to the captivating descriptions of East Berlin in the early 80s. I am definitely going to look for Erpenbeck's other books.
3. Applesauce Cake with Caramel Glaze. The news is terrible and it's not really a great time to be an American Jew but that won't stop me from doing a little high holiday feasting with my family and this is what we're having for dessert. It's kind of shocking how delicious this cake is given the modesty of its star ingredient. I mean, applesauce is something that only toddlers like, usually. And yet for whatever reason just seeing the recipe for this cake makes my mouth water, it's really that good.

I'm glad that a letter that starts with tree carnage ends with cake. I hope you find the light at the end of your donut hole, too—or something delicious in any event.