New York City, February 2, 2015

★★★★ The alarm that was ringing in the dark was in fact the ringing, some forty minutes ahead of the alarm, of an automated call to say that the preschool would be delayed. At the last minute before going out the door, the three-year-old traded Obi-Wan Kenobi in his spaceship for a little dark Batman, as company in the stroller-ride out into the grim and gothic morning. A new whitening coat lay over the old snow, and an evergreen in the forecourt was matted with icicles like a sheepdog’s fur. A blowing drizzle fell. More icicles hung from the scaffold crosspipes, and ice weight bent the bamboo by 66th Street all the way to the sidewalk. The drizzle became a soaking mist; the mist became a pattering rain. A snowblower threw up a grubby plume, the new and old mingled together in a shade that could only still be called white by virtue of its failure to have settled on any other color. The gutters were full of slush floating on the waters held back by slush dams. Stroller wheels pushed through hard slush packed on the sidewalk. The worst stretches, soggy and rutted and filthy, looked utterly forsaken. Batman’s cape was damp. The plastic rain shield had to come down. Liquid the color of coffee dripped from the stroller onto the school floor. A man fumed about the unreliability of Uber. In the afternoon, the distance grayed out and snow, good thick ordinary snow, fell fast at an angle. The white whitened anew, and packed snow took over for the hard slush. It was hard on the cars: a hatchback drove by with a rough hole opened in the windshield ice, one of its headlights diffused by an unbroken frozen shell. What was ostensibly a deluxe SUV spun its wheels and foundered in the soft piles, trying to escape its street parking spot. Least distressed, but most pitiable, came an eggplant-colored car, spotless and gleaming, newly emerged from the sanctuary of a garage to meet what the world was about to hit it with.