New York City, February 8, 2015

★ What was on the air? The haze of melting dirty snow, discouragement made visible. The three-year-old had put a blanket over his head and taken a nap, so that he had to be roused to go tire himself out. “Is it raining or dripping?” he asked, suspiciously, at the sight of the water-sheeted driveway under the scaffold. Dripping was the answer, though the difference barely mattered. The gutters were puddled, passing wheels splashed through black water. The cold didn’t sear exposed skin but sank through it into the depths of the finger joints. Two of the very few children on the playground raised a grim chiming sound by hammering at the square pipes of the climber with rocks of ice. The three-year-old threw ice chunks of his own, breaking off new ones from the undercut solid slush-ice all around, sending them crashing into snowbanks or gliding near frictionless on the wet rubber matting. There was nowhere really to run around. The concrete camel was locked in ice. From the open and puddled concrete inner yard came the dull intermittent ping of someone relentlessly hitting ground balls with an aluminum bat.