New York City, December 20, 2016

★★★★ Vent plumes, sunlit to brilliance, were the only cloudlike things in the astringently clear sky. A man walked a trio of tan dogs, two large and one small, so immaculately fluffy against the cold they must have been freshly washed and dried. The sun went glancing off things and caught a haze; a vast glowing nimbus preceded it as parallax carried it out from behind a building. The overheating indoors, with the outdoor gear still on, manifested itself down at the soles of the socks. First a downtown crosswalk sign was unreadable because of the glare surrounding it, and then an uptown sign was unreadable because of the glare off its face. A tall plywood construction wall, painted blank green, gleamed so the grain of it took on frantic, near-legible patterns.