New York City, December 16, 2015

★★★ No clouds were in the morning sky, but the sun still had trouble finding an angle down to the streets. People were bundled up again, but not fearfully so. At last the light got high enough to hit the corners of a column of balconies, and to illuminate the fine, fully bare branches where the last bright red leaves had been. By the end of the early afternoon school choral concert, the sun was gone, the sky covered in clouds that looked as absolute as the blue had. From up in the apartment, there was an opening in the cover still, down in the southwest. The light came rippling through it and spread highlights or lowlights along the bottoms of the clouds in a premature version of sunset, with dun and gray doing their best imitation of what scarlet and purple might do. Straight overhead the sky was abruptly clear blue again, then just as abruptly there was a pebbly field of cirrus there, then smoother cirrus. Down toward the sun all kinds of bright shapes were getting tangled up. By the time sundown really arrived, things had settled tastefully and anticlimactically on soft blurry pinks and bands of white. The night streets, on the way out to the grocery store, were shiny. It was raining harder than it looked like it was.