★★★ 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 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…

★★★ 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 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…

★★ 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…

★★★★ 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 clouds and the clock shift made it a labor even to begin the day. The effort was rewarded with the sight of snow roiling everywhere, fine flakes surging over the landscape. Then, like changing the channel, it was gone, back to the uneventful and slowly fading gray. Out on the Broadway median, in the…

★★★★ Seagulls were tiny flecks soaring high in the clear sky, turning from white to black and back again as their bodies alternately caught and blocked the sun. Broadway and Amsterdam was a complicated interchange for light-traffic, different streams of it bouncing downward off high apartment windows or coming low up…

★★★★ Sweltering humidity at its purest, unboosted by any overt solar heat. For once, and briefly, it was worth stepping into the office air conditioning, after the airless stairwell. Then the monstrous chill regained its monstrousness. The outside darkened. Mobile phones whined en masse, if not in perfect synchrony,…

★★★★★ Genial blue skies in the west gave no hint of the churning dark ocher-gray mass in the eastern sky. It was simultaneously monstrous and petite: the near edge must have been around Central Park West, and a swatch of blue at the horizon put the far side nowhere past the East River, if that. A pocket edition of the…

★★★ It was not hot yet on the way to nine in the morning, over wet, newly washed sidewalks. The air had gotten clearer overnight; the sky was a sharp blue. Cigarette smoke floated in the early light on 81st Street. The heat and haze came on, but with no power to chase people away. A group sat in the shade in the…

★★★ New leaves on Broadway were aglow in the morning’s sharp sunshine, under a clear sky. A cluster of blossoming trees shone like an oblong lampshade. The breeze was invigorating; the lack of warmth was not a liability now. From the vantage point of the sunny side of the streets, things in the shade barely seemed to…