New York City, January 7, 2016

★★ Morning was as harmless as it could be while still being identifiably wintry. The brown haze still lay on the horizon, and brown clouds grew up out of it. More clouds, thin and white, spread overhead. Neither the cold nor the light had any edge to them. The four-year-old let fall from his pocket one of the gloves that had replaced the gloves he had misplaced, but a passerby spotted it. Late afternoon turned pearly all of a sudden, and then clear gold light came bouncing off the north edge of the window. The clouds split into purple wisps that curved up and down in sine waves.