New York City, January 24, 2016

★★★★★ The sky had emptied out into a clear blue morning. The windblown slush had hardened into crooked fingers of ice clinging to the windowpanes, refracting the scene beyond. On the luxury building’s roof deck, the drifts were up to the controls on the gas grills. The lobby was full of bundled-up children coming and going. The four-year-old reached the sidewalk and immediately began climbing and pummeling the snowbanks, all other purpose forgotten. The snowpack on the curved glass roof of the Apple Store was dripping menacingly. On Broadway the first slush was already in the gutters. The trains were running far apart. There was a smell like wood smoke, a nice familiar after-blizzard smell, but in the Times Square station. Out the train windows, underground, there was snow: a medium-sized snowstorm’s worth of accumulation had found its way through the grates onto the 23rd Street platform; here and there snow traced the cables running along the tunnels. Huge wedges of snow reared atop the cars in Brooklyn. The four-year-old resumed his attack on the banks. A man passed wearing woolens, carrying wooden cross-country skis. A crew of entrepreneurs with shovels was digging out people’s vehicles from their parking spaces. Cars already liberated threw loose slush at pedestrians, and a truck strafed the sidewalk with salt. Steam rose from an egg-and-bacon bagel sandwich as young mouths nibbled at it on the go. Every visible contour of Prospect Park was being sledded on. The children found a pair of suitable runs and began saucering down them, while grown adults claimed the next run over. Eventually the adults fractured their last plastic disc with their weight and departed, their abandoned path glinting like a luge run. The children clustered their saucers and went down in a bumping mass. They heaved snowballs at one another. More adults arrived, sliding on a flattened Amazon carton and a partial saucer scavenged from the trash, the saucer fragment gliding and turning till it the broken edge caught and stranded the rider. A snowboarder hit the little slope, indifferent to where anyone else had been or aimed to go. The sun found a sheet of cloud and dimness fell so that the troughs of the saucer-tracks became invisible. A chill settled into the fingertips inside their gloves. The children retired from sliding and focused entirely on snowballs, keeping it up most of the way back from the park. The only complaint about their wet socks came when it was time to slip the boots back on, after hot chocolate, and their heels got stuck going in.