★★★ The blue spaces between the clouds narrowed through the morning. People took their lunches out on the plaza off the street, styrofoam clamshells hanging open. A hot white glow edged the remaining blue. The old summery reek of garbage was on the air; the ice cream truck smelled of ice cream garbage. It was not too…

★★★ Dawn’s fingers were the color of Tang powder, at the edge of a leaking gray sky. The dimness could not dissuade the children from rising early. Downtown, the sun was coming out, then not, over streets with puddles charting their mini-topography. Haze gathered over the afternoon and the loveliness of the air rose…

★★★★ Thin clouds and haze muffled the morning light. The atmosphere was cool like sweaty clothes after an otherwise refreshing nap. The Citi Bike racks were suddenly near empty. At the thought of canvas sneakers, that very model of canvas sneakers appeared through a shop window. A delivery cyclist cruised slowly…

★★★ A fine bright morning showed no signs of the trouble forecast to come. A window washer had swung open the glass walls of the near-finished apartments across the avenue and working was out on the bare concrete ledge. The slender stems of the lights along the top of a billboard laid long, conspicuous strips of…

★★★★ A sky that seemed irreconcilably divided between a high clearing blue and a low-lying murky winter gray found, for a moment, a gray but glowing balance between them. The glow faded and huge, gorgeous snowflakes floated by, sparsely at first and then with a ridiculous polka-dotted density, streaming from south to…

★★★★★ The elevator on the way out into the day was already hot. High bright clouds switched the baking heat of the sun off and on. A police horse with white streaks in its mane and tail and rump ambled along the edge of the soccer camp. Mushrooms had sprouted in all the forks of one elm’s roots, while the next elm…

★★ The clouds deserved a better day underneath them. They were clean white and voluminous in the morning, with deep blue between them. But the air made for difficult breathing; the Citi Bike rack was full. The clouds continued regardless, all through the day: now showing blazing white edges, now piling textured grays…

★★ The subway led away from the dull, thick morning into sunshine downtown. The children traipsed to the office and back, little umbrellas unused, with a minimum of complaint. A bright but heavy shower fell in the afternoon, but the sun came right back. Then the rain repeated, from darker clouds but with the sun…

★★★ Early morning rain faded out like an aspect of the departing night, leaving an artistically sunlit haze on the river. It was mild again. There was no excuse for hopping the 1 train for a single stop, to change at 59th. No good enough excuse, anyway, though there were the lingering puddles along Broadway, the sun…

★★★ Fine snow was blowing up through the clogged traffic on Amsterdam. From the 27th floor, only the outline of a cruise ship really backed up the broker’s assurance that the river really would be in view out there, somewhere. The flakes turned bigger and quickly put a white layer on everything that wasn’t moving and…

★★★★ A moving cloud show throughout the day, cumulus formations going steadily uptown. What looked at first glance like a stable drifting mass revealed shaggy edges, pulling and fraying and roiling at a faster slow-motion pace than the main body. The wind was in constant motion below. There were traces of yellow in…

★★★ A sunbeam came through the mottled cloud cover and found the little alley where a man stood. Breeze tossed the flax blooming opportunistically where last year’s opportunistic jimsonweed had been cleared away. By afternoon, the sky had gone over to white and blue. Jackhammers rattled down by the street and a cool…

★★★ Cold seeped through the window glass and blasted through the open doorway of the apartment lobby. To the south, out on Amsterdam, the sun covered the avenue with a white shine. A cab had pulled over at an angle, beside a parked silver Mercedes, and the Mercedes driver was getting jumper cables out of his trunk. On…

★★ Overlapping shadows in the crisscrossing light cast a dark spearpoint ahead of the stroller advancing westward. The three-year-old wanted to know why his hat mussed his hair on days like this one. Out on the bright blue Hudson, a green-and-white tugboat pushed a barge behind a slightly lighter green and white…

★★★ The morning was sticky enough for air conditioning, but not actually hot. The clouds, after days of equivocation, made and then delivered a straightforward threat: rain, smashing across the river in a blinding rush. The drops swirled, fat and white, like snow; they swerved and shuddered downward like so many…

★★★★★ Manhattan receded in shades of blue, like a mountain range. Building windows flashed in the sun to the west of the train, while the east lay in haze. Thin clouds and clear sky bled together, borderless. Faint dampness and a faint chill hung on the morning suburban streets. It was fine for walking. Good for…

★★★★★ A dark moth had blundered in on the night air. It made its way back across the living room, encouraged by an old newspaper section, and tried to escape into daylight in the little blind glass space where the sliding windows overlapped, a child-safe distance. The strong sideways light was like a drumroll, like a…

★★★★ Under the thinnest filtering clouds, the recycling truck worked its way through the lot, supervised by a crow and the toddler. The brief and deliberate dose of unsunscreened sun did nothing to awaken the melanocytes, dormant or now possibly atrophied from city dwelling. The surf at morning high tide was tinted…

★★★ The sky was clear, the cold correspondingly more piercing. The vapor blew straight sideways from the pipe on the new building, pointing uptown. All the brightness out the window made it tempting to duck out for the first school pickup with a short-sleeved shirt on under the down coat. That was an error. Over by…

★ The air through the windows was cooler in temperature than the suffocating, humid air indoors, but it was too damp to ease the discomfort. A few outriders from the climate-change march were lined up on one side of Broadway, opposite the people still lined up to consume the new obsolescence-making, resource-intensive…