New York City, March 15, 2017

★★★ A crew of three was bashing at the ice encasing a parked car, using heavy snow-breaking tools. There jagged ice stuck to the vertical faces of the walls on the plaza and smooth sheet ice lay on the sidewalk outside. The younger boy complained that he didn’t look like himself, because static electricity was plastering his hair down. The whiteness on the sky became cloud cover, and a burst of tiny snowflakes blew around briefly. More bits of snow and bits of sun appeared tentatively and simultaneously in the deep cold of afternoon. The late-day wind whipped along the cross street, throwing down the hood as soon as it went up. Slush lagoons held the curb cuts, and for a moment, in the confusion of cleared and uncleared surfaces, the bike lane on Sixth Avenue looked like the sidewalk.