New York City, April 6, 2017

★★★ It seemed as if hitting the stuck umbrella button with a hammer might knock it back into alignment and make it work again, but that was not the case. The majority of the household had not wanted to wake up, and what waited outside was a fine soaking rain, unhurried and unending. Downtown it had intensified into something louder and more quickly drenching; midafternoon brought first white nautical sheets of it sweeping past the windows, then a heavy obscuring deluge coming straight down. Thunder and lightning followed, in the now deep dark of the afternoon. A sheet of standing water with bubbles in it covered the subway mezzanine in Union Square. The windows of an arriving train were so fogged it was impossible to tell how crowded the car was till the doors opened. Minutes too late to have waited out the rain, it ended. The sky was suddenly blue and white, and the puddles in the deeply flooded tree-planting beds mirrored it. An earthworm and a band-aid lay sodden on the sidewalks. In 20 minutes there was light reflecting everywhere, shining in the still-wet leaves of a shrub on the neighboring roofdeck. One last low, rushing mass of clouds, dark with sundown, hurried northward, and through a rift in them came a glimpse of a brilliant spark of airplane, far away in the high remaining daylight.