New York City, March 23, 2014

★★ The wind early on was not necessarily wintry by the thermometer, but there was nothing springlike about it. The sky was flat gray and the river even flatter — the latter the color of off-white paint, as if someone had worked in the details of the New Jersey and Manhattan skyline and had yet to fill in the horizontal band between them. Two flaring white spots marked the late sun, then a blurry square. At last, the sun descended to reach a band of clear sky in the west, and simultaneously the clouds at the zenith dissolved to blue, with only shred of white remaining; beams of hot golden light bounced from building to building, spanning blocks. After dark, in the cleared cold air, there was nothing approximate about the wintriness.