First Snow

A few days before Thanksgiving, the weather in New York begins to seriously turn. You can have days in the low 60s up through Halloween sometimes, and by the second week of November, you're asking the universe how long this loveliness might last.

Not for long, it answers.

The cold arrives suddenly, almost unexpectedly, even though you remember it from the year before, even though you've lived here long enough not to be fooled.

The first snow of the season blanketed us over the weekend, so that when I woke up on Sunday morning, my fire escape and window sills were covered in soft white powder. I love New York in the first few hours of the snow--not later, of course, when the piles of black sludge, as high as people, sit on street corners through mid-March slowly shrinking, and every afternoon you step over piles of frozen dog shit, and suspiciously yellow ice forms on low drifts--but it can be so beautiful in that early moment; we're taken by surprise. The noise of the city settles for an hour or so, as if it had finally found some sort of peace.