New York City, February 16, 2015

★ The slashing cold air coming through the briefly opened window made being housebound with ailing children seem like a reasonably good alternative to the day’s other, lost possibilities. Grills had been installed on the roof space of the still-unfinished building across the avenue — not the most obvious item to have ticked off the checklist before building out the apartment interiors, but there they were, snow on their shiny surfaces. Slowly the bright blue sky whitened and then grayed. Outside, at last, in the night, the lights were bright off the salt-crusted pavement and off the clouds, the uncertain color of a paler variety of actual eggplant. Sections of snowbanks had gone to over to solid, clear ice; solid ice lay on the edges of the planters. Two bundled-up figures sat at tables in a public vestibule, behind a row of glass doors each labeled “Public Space” in some developer’s concession. According to the signage, it would close at midnight.