New York City, January 6, 2015

★★★★ The snow came on all at once, with no visible preliminaries, while the three-year-old was refusing to change into his underwear: fine sifting flakes, falling thickly, quickly coating the shrubbery and the cars and the rim of the fountain. Salt grains cleared their little penumbras on the sidewalk. At the time the hourly forecast said the snow ought to be stopping, it was blowing hard sideways, somehow going directly at the face whether one was headed crosstown or downtown. The snow accumulated in the bike lane and re-whitened the dark slush layer left by turning cars. It traced the branchings of discarded Christmas trees, the seams and decorative grooves in the sidewalk, the inner rim of the crosswalk signals, the top edges of the bricks where the churchyard wall bellied out. It covered the plastic-coated menus still on sidewalk tables. On the back window of a Lexus, it would tempt someone to trace the name “Clara” and two hearts with a finger. The ground was slippery, but if you paid attention to how you stepped, there was no real trouble.