The spewing fire hydrants and Mr. Softee trucks have departed, replaced by bright bubble coats and coffee jug laden shopping carts driven by tightly bundled women. Subway cars remain a place of refuge-now stuffy and beginning the back dripping perspiration instead of chilling and sweat retracting. With the first snow fallen but not stuck, Uptown’s numerous stair cases iced over, and Rockefeller Center barricaded off, the arbitrary and atmospheric markings of winter signals the entire disappearance of summertime looseness.

Summer in the City drags on, the days lengthy and seemingly purposeless, but not without the silent admiration of those present. The trains will never be this vacant, beach towel space never shared so generously, the pace of life dialed back from rapid to merely quick: a moment of reprieve reserved for those decidedly embedded in the city, whether by choice or not. And so, I wouldn’t alter one day of my solitudinous, glowing, permeated by empty anticipation summer.