New York City, April 5, 2015

★★★★ The coats — it had been just cold enough to require the coats — made a thick heap in the corner of the pew, leaving scant room to sit. What had been a cloudless sky was intermittently veiled as the children scurried after the eggs. When the eggs were gone, the three-year-old turned his residual excitement to leaping from the top of the churchyard’s retaining wall, a drop roughly equal to his full height. The clouds thickened into gray edged with white thistledown; the afternoon darkened. Now and again there were glory rays angling down from them, or a wash of sunlight through the all-glass corner of the glass apartment tower, or tangled streaks of gold between clouds. For a while the river sparkled blindingly downstream, and for a different while upstream lay flat and bright. The three-year-old went out with his scooter and came back with a sweaty head and a bumped elbow.