New York City, May 7, 2014

★★★★ The sun was up and unimpeded so early that it seemed as if everyone must have overslept. So much day, when checked against the clock on the mobile phone — enough to relax and roll over and be woken up an hour later by a child, once everyone had overslept for real. By the end of the school drop-offs, the two-year-old had made up for the lost time, bombing down the wide gradual downhill on his scooter so fast that the parental scooter-minding shuffle-jog gave way to a real trot, past Japanese maples saturated with wine-red. The security guard at the co-op complex turned his head to the sunshine, peeled off his cap, and ran a hand over his face. A sparrow splashed in the chemically turquoise-tinted waters of the top tier of the fountain. The toddler, returning from school, could not get enough of scootering, back and forth across the sunny plaza, ignoring his demonstrated knowledge of the brake in favor of crashing into a wall or the footing of a railing. Sweat matted his hair when the helmet came off. The white-brick condo tower borrowed some blue from the sky. A harmless approximation of summer, summer without the suffering. In the late afternoon, the black rubber matting on the playground overlooking the Hudson gave off mild waves of heat. The play of light and chilly shade through the western clouds was like the play of the children: now congenial, now disagreeable, now tenuously congenial again.