★★★★ The gray morning was gentle on the eyes and cool like damp concrete. Petals and maybe a raindrop blew on the breeze. People were still out in cutoffs. Intermittent sun would appear, allowing them to justify the decision. It was hard to tell the film-crew members from the people staring at the film crew from 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…

★★★★★ The toddler and the clear blue sky each made the case for getting outside at once—onto the third-floor play deck, up to the fourth floor deck for grownups, and then down and out the front to watch cement trucks pouring concrete into the boom pump. Little white clouds arrived, a tasteful assortment. The tourists…

★★ Between the deep freeze just gone and the storm due to come, the day assumed the guise of uneventfulness. It was warm enough for people to amble stupidly three abreast or to stand vacantly in a still-snow-pinched curb cut because the signal was still the orange hand in one of the two available directions. The parka…

★ It was time to focus maybe on the sun-flushed pinkish haze of buds in the crowns of the trees far below. Little phenomena. Not to listen to the women in the elevator commiserating about their heavy coats. The singing of the birds—or was that too agitated? The cold was the cold, the same defeating cold. Enough of the…

★★★ 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…

★★★ Everything lay in brilliantly sharp focus, the colors clear and saturated. The brightness was no compensation for the biting cold—now plainly and a little ridiculously out of season—but on its own terms, it was a thrilling sight. A dog went skidding on the dry pavement, unwilling, as its leash-holder detoured to…

★★★ 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…

★★ Frozen staleness, made interesting only by its treachery. A long coffee stain stretched across the top of a snowbank. Drips from an idling cement mixer had cut a hole in the ice and washed clean one small spot of the white crosswalk marking. Sixty-sixth Street was still full of grainy brown slush. Downtown at the…

★★ 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…