New York City, February 5, 2015

★★★ The predawn dark carried the creaking and hydraulic hissing of garbage trucks collecting garbage, not plowing snow. Dawn proper was gray and hard to wake up to. A few snowflakes went past the window. Then the sky grew bright enough to be stimulating. Wind growled against the building. “The wind is pushing me!” a teenager yelled. The edge of another’s hood flapped wildly. The snowbanks were solid and slippery, the sky a keen blue. Tumbled ice was out on the Hudson by the shore, but it would have been child abuse to detour on the way out of the preschool to get a closer look at it. New clouds grew, loosely assembled, golden on their leading edges as they drifted south. In the night, a woman in a fur coat and athletic shoes walked a little dog. The chewing gum from the subway newsstand was brittle. The plume from the steam plant on 59th Street went sideways, white and solid as a fallen marble pillar against the dark blue, as far as the eye could follow.