New York City, April 17, 2013

★★★★★ 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 median, and pale green new growth spread over the shrubbery. Down on Grand Street, where the subway exit fed onto the sidewalk, the massed humanity caught on the projecting fruit stands and slowed to near immobility. A little boy crouched down to peer through a flap cut in the mesh over a construction fence, at a parked backhoe. At the office, it was colder inside than out. From the roof, birdsong was general. People walking past had their jackets in their hands. Uptown, waiting at the roasted-corn cart for part of dinner, the kindergartener launched himself in big loops out across the broad sidewalk and back, out and back. “This is the biggest and the smallest adventure of my life,” he said. His brother, in the stroller, bounced and pointed: the taxis, a bicycle, a police car, the moon.