★★ An indecisive follow-up to the sweeping storms of the night before. Morning was humid gray. A couple crowded into the niche between the turnstile fence and the MetroCard machines to kiss. The air was close and still. Paulownia leaves sprouting from a traffic-calming planting bed found enough breeze to wiggle on,…

★★★★ A realist take on the season. The sky had accumulated some grubby tan around its lower edge, and the breeze through the window brought in mild notes of mud and fuel oil and aquatic life. The Hudson was not a visual element but a river, two crosstown blocks away. See it, smell it. This made the breeze more…

★★★★ Mares’ tails blew north and away, leaving the dome clear, the color deepest at the zenith. Down below the windows, treetops were the color of tennis balls. A child stood on the sidewalk outside the school, staring at the organic soft-serve truck, refusing to leave. Blossom clusters were soft pink fists. The…

★★ Listless rain fell for a while in a lightless morning. Then there was mildness and humidity, with bright patches in the gray implying promises. Up the subway stairs was a glimpse of blue and a glimmer of sunlight—lost, in a 90 degree pivot, to a cold breeze and a dark mass of clouds over Lower Manhattan. When…

★★ Dim, dim, dim. Birds moved like airplanes against the lowered morning sky. A street sweeper raised a choking cloud of dust in the still air. Near midday, a golden glow found the elevated expressway, then faded out again. The color of the haze gradually shifted, sometimes amber, sometimes grim brown; bright rifts…

★★★★ Warmth to be semi-reckoned with. The thick hoodie, prudent on the way out for the school dropoff run, was bothersome by the end of a detour to the market on the way back. Once the day was established, though, people clinging to shorts and t-shirts mingled with the ones moving on to lightweight jackets. Apparently…

★★★★ The harbor islands faded off in the southern distance in a moderate haze. Tortoiseshell ripples of light wobbled around the bottom of the hotel pool, through murky water. Somewhere in the glass-roofed corridor of the mall, outside the food court, a bird was chirping, the sound echoing off the polished surfaces.…

★★★★★ Outdoors was better than indoors. The humidity had worked its way into the apartment and gotten stuck there: Moving around was like pushing through a shower curtain, and the clothes from the washer lay on the rack without drying. Outside, though, was gleaming. Leaves were out on the little trees on the Broadway…

★★★★ 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…

★★★★ Shapely cumulus clouds occupied the near sky with cirrus wisps behind them, but downriver was bleary grime-colored summer haze. A blimp cruised up the Hudson just above the line where the clear blue began. Out on the street, under clear hot sun, the puddle garbage was softening and cooking into a gray stew. Pale…

★ 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…

★★★ 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…

★★★ At daybreak, the heaters were blowing, in the bedroom and living room alike. The freezing point was almost visible, going from microclimate to microclimate: the puddles on Amsterdam had skins of ice, but the ones on Columbus were liquid. A white glaze of iced-up snow stuck to some car roofs but not others. It…

★★★ Breath came out as white as cigarette smoke, and inhaling felt dangerous. The breeze was gentle if you were an anemometer, but unbearable by fleshly standards. Had someone maliciously added an extra block of walking between the subway and the office, somehow? Late clouds were soft-edged and buff-colored, like…

★★★★ 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…