★★★ 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…

★ Morning arrived in dimness, with a soaking rain, perfect for not having to send anyone off to school in. The rain went away and came back and went away; the sky brightened a little and more drops streaked the windows. Clouds blew along from north to south. Late in the day, blue and white appeared in the west, just…

★★★★ 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…

★★ Enthusiasm boiled off fast in the sun. The toddler got tired of walking as soon as he’d gone out the door and across the avenue, calling a halt next to the fly-swarmed and puddling trash bags outside the bodega. The older boy said he could smell the subway, a harsh metal smell, half a block before the entrance.…

★★★ 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…

★★★★ 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…

★★★★ In the sleepy cloudshade of morning, a teen on the bench pinched a rolling paper in his fingers, surrounded by other teens. The tag came off the waterproof jacket that had been waiting in the closet since Christmas. A light and harmless drizzle started falling. Walking was still pleasant; the smell of cart food…

★★★★ 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…

★★ A dog turd on the rainy pavement was thinning out into a surrounding pool of color, like a glob of burnt-sienna acrylic on a palette. Dabs of it had been foot-painted up the sidewalk going east. The umbrella, tipped forward level to the ground, chattered in the headwind. The oppressive new scaffold on Broadway was…

★★ Armpits. Men had given up or allowed themselves to give up and were walking around wearing tank tops. Early clouds, separated by fissures of blue, had drawn briefly together and then dispersed, leaving the sun impeded. Leaves tossed in a not at all cooling wind. A truck forced its way through a crosswalk, sending…

★★★ 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…