★★★ 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…

★ The better it looked, the worse it felt, and it never looked all that good. A mild, grayed-out humid morning brightened irregularly toward a hot, brighter, still-humid noon. A day for carrying along a cheap umbrella, stashing it in a corner, and forgetting to bring it home. Having reached its uncomfortable…

★★★ 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…

★★★★ Three pigeons banked in unison in the sunlight in the middle distance. Behind them was the Norwegian Jewel at anchor, and behind that a light blue haze downriver. High clouds came together in a ventilated cover, and then an unventilated one. Midafternoon was just gray; joggers were out on the West Side Highway in…

★★★★ A little yellowish cumulus was showing in the distance up Columbus Avenue. There were some sort of clouds directly overhead in the overall blue, but it was too bright to look at them. It had taken real resolve to put on sunscreen and get out the door. People in medals and bibs, more motivated people, had already…

★ The fur-trimmed hood, the puffy coat, the scarf–the passing procession of things still not safe to abandon. The airway cooled and tightened with each inhalation, like skin splashed with rubbing alcohol. Fine in the abstract and inexcusable after four full weeks of springtime. Bright morning clouded over into…

★★★★ 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…

★★ Sequel time: another summer day looped backwards through the projector, with storms unbuilding to a clear and quiet finish. A tolerably damp morning turned into another downpour, and another downpour after that. When that part was done, everything was waterlogged, with the unwanted heat rising faster than the…

★ Rain first splatted, then pattered, in the dim morning. Fog filled in the woods. Birds chattered and trilled; wings flashed white against the darkness of sunflower hulls. Little round chickadees bounced from cane to cane of the dormant trumpet vine. The boards of the porch were slick with water and damp greenness.…

★★★ A rim of bright sky to the north, in the morning, made it seem as if the clouds might be going. They reconstituted themselves soon enough, though. The only change from the gray days before was that the old, hard cold was back. Dry skin and a dry cough came to meet it—nothing too awful, yet. Daylight did its…

★★ Bright clear sun was quickly suppressed, before it could inspire any hope or enthusiasm. Pruning crews were up on cherry pickers snipping the strings of lights off the trees on Broadway. A dim blue light gimmered on a trove of abandoned drink bottles in the express track bed. The cold sank in through the sneakers.…

★★★★ The coats—it had been just cold enough to require the coats—made a thick heap in the corner of the pew, leaving scant room to sit. What had been a cloudless sky was intermittently veiled as the children scurried after the eggs. When the eggs were gone, the three-year-old turned his residual excitement to leaping…

★★★★ Smells moved individually on the air currents, rather than hanging together in one stale accumulated stench. The sun had a little sharpness to it, but high clouds screened the worst of it and it no longer had the angles to unleash its full power. Summer’s late bid at awfulness had collapsed like all its previous…

★★★★ 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…

★ A food cart’s row of light bulbs glowed conspicuously at midday, under the persistent gloom. Little raindrops had streaked the windows; the children had needed outerwear. Downtown, the sidewalk psychic stared blankly from her chair. It was not quite raining but not at all nice: neat raincoats and careless sunny-day…

★★★★  Someone found it irresistible to start jackhammering in the earliest daylight. Downtown, a woman in a light dress and broad-brimmed hat posed for a photograph in the bicycle lane, after pausing for a cyclist to go by. The sun backlit the clouds into fierce whiteness–white puffy cumulus clouds and clustered white…

★★★★ Moist and moderate, a day misplaced from some other month or latitude. The chill in the air was mild, to be welcomed through an open jacket or an open window. Surely there were extra errands worth running out in it, excuses to take a stroll—but the clock and the daylight had not abandoned their December duties.…

★★★ Thin spots of blue showed through the clouds, seen straight up from the pillow. Again cool air had come in through the window in the night; so had a mosquito, perched on the bathroom mirror, where it left a red smear of fresh human blood when squashed. So had a pepper cloud of tiny insects, up at the top of the…

★★★ There was something near-springlike about the brightish sun and the heavy drip from the scaffolds. The north was blue, the southern sky white and more whitening. Snow aging to slush lay in the planting beds around the trees or where a tree should have been. The three-year-old held the scooter handlebars with bare…

★★★ A rim of bright sky to the north, in the morning, made it seem as if the clouds might be going. They reconstituted themselves soon enough, though. The only change from the gray days before was that the old, hard cold was back. Dry skin and a dry cough came to meet it—nothing too awful, yet. Daylight did its…