★★★★ A wash of warm sun and a puff of cool breeze balanced out one another. Gem-like details sparkled on adults’ serious running sneakers and a little girl’s decorated shoes. A pear tree stretched its luminous canopy far out over Broadway. Blue daylight showed through the slowly turning joint of the drive shaft of a…

★★★★ A sky of solid rippling gray became one of open clear blue in the time between waking up and the morning viola lesson. A disc of wan reflected daylight reached the floor of the practice room through the round window, revealing the yellow in the fluorescent light all around it. Another hour or so and there was…

★ Intermittent rain threatened to consolidate, but never did. The wind was cold, the ambient chill strong enough to sink in. Steam billowed from a stack in the street. The rain went away, but the gray and chill remained. Maple wings and the untrampled portion of the pale fallen leaves blew along the sidewalk.

★★★★ 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…

★★★★ After a foreboding moment, blue showed through the gray. It was surprisingly cool early; thin sheets of cloud took the edge off the sun, and little breezes were moving. The sidewalks were well smeared with dog shit, the rain long overdue to make up for accumulated inconsideration. Potted boxwoods awaited planting…

★★ Two dense flocks of little dark birds plunged past the window, against the gray. The sun was a white unround blotch, the warmth was ebbing, the light dull. Wind rattled in the withered drab oak leaves still on the branches. The afternoon was short, though by nightfall the clouds had separated into individual forms,…

[No stars] The snow from overnight, now the newest old snow, lightly covered the older and dirtier snow. On cars that had been driven, melted patches showed the ghostly pattern of the internal structure of their hoods. To the east, the sun on the whiteness and the wetness gave everything a spurious pristine shine. The…

★★★★★ The light was so dazzling it seemed like it had to be warm, but the air was cool and fresh. A woman’s teeth gleamed much too whitely in the shade of a scaffold; a support beam showed like a false stair tread through the light-flooded translucent landing on the way to the bottom of the Apple Store, causing a…

★★★★ The warmth of the day before had backed off—spring was not going fully sweaty yet, not at all. Pictures that had sat around unhung for months and months suddenly could be understood to need nothing but a half-minute’s attention with a hammer. There was a cool breeze in the streets, and scooters and strollers and…

★★★ Again leaves were falling, individually and distinctly, this time chips of yellow drifting down and away from the lindens. The harshness had departed. Two cherry pickers were hanging snowflake decorations from the traffic-light poles downtown. The clouds thickened somewhat, with a disproportionate effect on the…

★★★★★ The first autumn previews, in the clean and indirect light of a cool morning. Fresh air embraced people trudging up the steps from the close tunnels of West 4th station. The Citibike rack on LaGuardia Place was all but empty. A last-quarter moon stood high in the daytime sky. The brightness over Houston Street…

★★★★ The light bouncing under the scaffold could have passed for direct sunlight, till the direct sunlight appeared. The subway had aired out a little; Prince Street smelled of festival food. The afternoon sun made the eyes squint, and squinting brought down a lit-up line of eyebrows, blurry spangled halos along the…

★★★★ The sun cast shadows through clouds, then didn’t cast shadows, then did again. It was cool again, the actually narrow window of temperature in which men can go out in sportcoats, and men were doing that proudly, even unto a pocket square. People were willing to sit on sidewalk benches with their coffee or a phone…

★★★★ The morning air was damp and smelled of the Chesapeake, a minimum of five miles away. Diffuse sun cast soft-edged shadows. The daffodils were up, and the hyacinths, and the forsythia was starting to blossom. A goldfinch was in full yellow now. Out on the highway was chalky brightness; the tunnel and then the…