New York City, May 16, 2016

★★★★★ Morning was as cold as winter. The only difference was that the leaves blown into drifts had been struck down in their new green. Scraps of fractus went by low and fast overhead. Bigger cumulus in the west seemed at first not to be moving but were advancing head on. The wind cooed and groaned in the building. A man slept on a bench in the near-impenetrable shade; a woman wrestled a billowing silvery cover over a motor scooter. The wintriness had abated at midday, less through the warming of the air than through its increased capacity for carrying smells. Buildings reared up in the sun, their shadow-cut stonework stacked like crackers or Fig Newtons. Just over the top of the Parsons building a luminous red-tailed hawk came turning.