New York City, April 22, 2015

★★★ A fine bright morning showed no signs of the trouble forecast to come. A window washer had swung open the glass walls of the near-finished apartments across the avenue and working was out on the bare concrete ledge. The slender stems of the lights along the top of a billboard laid long, conspicuous strips of shadow diagonally across the image. The sky stayed flawless into afternoon — then, abruptly, it wasn’t. Lumpy dark gray came in from the west. A piebald pigeon with a white face and white wings mounted a regular pigeon-colored pigeon by the edge of a roof. When it was done, it flew off with a slow clapping sound. The sinister gray receded, briefly, and then it was back again and raining. By rush hour the rain seemed to be over downtown, but uptown it was falling again. Finally it yielded for good, to a wash of late light and a gaudy sunset.