New York City, March 1, 2015

★★★★ The snow was, at first and for a moment, nothing more than an extra gray on the grayness. On close inspection, it manifested itself against the dark neighboring balcony railing as a very few little flakes moving nowhere particular. Then behind those there was something like a driving mist, innumerable tiny flakes moving sharply northward, and soon not so tiny. By early afternoon the flakes were big and dropping straight down, laying a solid new coat on everything, March arriving fluffy and white. The three-year-old swabbed it up with a mitten, down to bare sidewalk, and had to be quickly stopped from eating what he’d gathered. Then he went sprinting off through the white in his lately hand-me-down boots, with the spider pattern in unlicensed Spider-Man colors. The toe of a hard old snowbank tripped him and he bounced up unfazed. He mountaineered along the ridge of old ice, stooped at a corner to try to make snowballs of the unsticky fluff. The wind was coming east on the cross street and he ran into it, squinting his eyes and sticking his tongue down and out. In the forecourt he went down on all fours to plow a path, and the snow quickly filled it in behind him. “It looks like Luke Skywalker is on the planet Hoth,” he said, mounting the low wall to knock accumulation out of the leaves of the shrubbery. Flakes landed on the smartphone screen and melted and scattered the pixel colors, like tiny costume-jewelry gemstones. As four approached, it was impossible to tell exactly where the curb was on the jaywalk with the seven-year-old across Amsterdam. The older boy was less ostentatious about catching the snowflakes as he went, but catch them he did: They were big enough to taste, he said, but they only tasted like water. There was ice in them now, flicking the exposed skin on the face. Outside the McDonald’s, a small dog on a leash lunged and barked at a snowblower.