New York City, March 5, 2015

★★★★★ The subconscious, taking what it had last seen and felt before bed, dreamed of a rainy letdown, a lingering thaw. Nor did the phone ring early to announce any school closing. So it was a surprise to open the blinds onto exactly what had been forecast, a grayout of seedy little flakes already reclaiming the briefly unfrozen world. It was coming down fast enough to put a clean blue tinge on even the roadways. Snow was building on the uptown faces of traffic signs and the windward edge of poles; a schoolbus roof was lumpily furred with it. Somehow the snow was blowing all the way down the subway stairs and angling onto the landing from the left and from the right, neat and symmetrical as theater curtains. It was accumulating substantially on the hoods and backpacks of the streetwear shoppers as they stood in line. A woman walked half-twisted to talk to her companion through the narrow aperture of her hood. A minivan’s passenger-side wiper, missing its blade, thrust its uselessly twisting arm out into space. The snow had packed itself into the little seams at the top of the parka’s zipper. It fell and fell, the flakes now generously large — ideal, unfaltering, the long icy winter’s finest storm. There was no getting ahead of it or out from under: It built up on railings, windowsills, the edges of dumpsters, every detail of the city made cleaner and taller and new. It did not omit the surfaces of the fliers announcing a film shoot, or the lids of the coffee cups left by the cafe’s smoking bench. The people themselves blurred, disheveled hair mixing with the ragged supplemental hairdos of a fur hat or a ruffed hood. The slush shushed or splutted frankly underfoot. Not until the blue of twilight did the flakes dwindle, a full day’s work complete.