New York City, December 25, 2014

★★★★ The night noises of hard-blown rain, sounding solid against the windows, were gone. Overhead was gray, but along the western sky stretched a strip of extra-pale blue, fringed with white. The blue expanded up and east, with dark purple clouds standing against it in the distance. The children put on hoodies over their little blazers in the springlike air. There were puddles at the crosswalks, and a heavy drip was falling from a scaffold. By the end of the morning service, the whole sky was bright blue, with tiny white shreds of cloud blowing fast across it. “Windy! Windy! Windy!” the three-year-old exulted. He drew out the syllables and rocked back and forth on the shoulders with each one: “Win! Dy! Win! Dy!” More clouds rolled in as fast as the early ones had rolled out — mixed-up gray ones, with glowing spots and blue patching shining through — but the sun kept finding its way past the obstruction. Yet again, a full hour before sunset, the downriver sky was already dark orange.