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When heavy snow hits, it's like cholesterol building up around the heart of New York City, jamming streets, putting taxis at a premium, rendering the footpaths impassable.
Driving is considered by only the most skilled or foolhardy. An antic excitement fills the crowds. People want nothing more than to get home.
Perhaps this was on the mind of 46-year-old Elmaz Qyra of Brooklyn, an Albanian who had come to America to - it sounds trite to recount that fact, somehow, with its freightload of immigrant hope - 10 years ago. An employee of the Athletic Club, working on the bar, he was heading home after a shift.
The flurries had begun that morning, slushy and somehow adolescent, worthy of good-natured complaint, but not respect. It's odd looking at snow from different vantage points. When you're high up, falling snow seems to foreshorten everything, to draw the towers closer, and bring the ground nearer. Yet when you look up into flurries - not the heavy kind, mind - it makes the sky seem larger.
Qyra set out across Central Park. He loved the place, so family members have said, taking his children there in summer after work. He was walking along a section of the park called Literary Way, so named for the statues there of Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Robbie Burns.
On televisions in bars, and living rooms, and in cabs, the weather reporters would have been telling New Yorkers to prepare for a big one. Weather is news in the US, in part because it's often colossal, but also, perhaps because it fits certain requirements of narrative: good pictures, an event that effects everyone (in comparison with the turgid seven hour healthcare summit that was being broadcast the same day; the Republicans who are against healthcare reform won, commentators insist, because they seemed not entirely unreasonable).
In this age of narrowcasting, perhaps weather is the last thing with mainstream appeal.
At around 3.30 Qyra's body was discovered. He had been hit on the head by a snow-laden branch from an American elm tree. The branch was about six metres long, and had fallen from almost 24 metres up.
Sometime later a snow-laden branch hit a bus and a car on Fifth Avenue. No one was hurt.
Qyra's brother-in-law told reporters that this was a "freak accident". Qyra leaves behind a wife, and two children, a 14-year-old son, and a 19-year-old daughter.
It's still snowing as I write this, and the city resembles a Hallmark Christmas card cover. Public schools are shut, flights have been delayed (mostly at Newark Liberty airport in New Jersey), and power is out for around 600,000 people in the four states hit hardest.
Even though choked and diminished by the snow storm, in New York, it's stories like Qyrna's that strike a chord on days like this. They remind you of your fragility. You could be rubbed out at any time. The wrong place, the wrong time. Bingo.
Meanwhile, nature is at its busywork, filling the air, piling up on ledges, adding insult to injury, and in the case of a very unlucky man, offering a final white coda to the end of his journey.
Read more of Tim Wilson's blogs.
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