New York City, May 17, 2016

★★ The day arrived humid and dim, not wet and dark, and nothing seemed to change as the hours went by. Invisibly it got warmer, then colder again. The small percentage chance of showers in the forecast meant, by afternoon, that some fractional portion of rain was falling, not even steady enough to be a drizzle. A man in a raincoat struggled to get out of a pedicab in a wholly unpicturesque block of Seventh Avenue. The chill and damp made the knees ache. The sun at last found a slit between the clouds and the roof of the neighboring apartment slab and came briefly straight sideways into the apartment, the golden hour compressed to one fleeting rectangle on the far wall and a glimmer in the reflective strips of the hanging backpacks.