New York City, January 31, 2017

★★★★ The pipes outside the practice-room window were gray; the white-brick building a block away was gray; the brownish bricks were grayish brown. Snowflakes, big and opaque, began going by, chiefly at a 45-degree angle but with various alternative speeds and directions mixed in. All through the morning and midday the flakes kept falling, sometimes cartoonishly large, sometimes tiny. They traced tree branches and stuck to parked cars and got in the grille scoops of cars that were moving. The flakes passed huge and individual through the field of vision while walking and hung dark against the sky above. One sailed into the mouth and melted there, keeping its texture for a fraction of a second. The snow kept changing and falling, then faded out a while before the daylight did. Out on the wet pavement at dusk, it was hard to decide whether the failure to accumulate had been mercy or insincerity.