No, I haven't been playing hookey -- I've been working on getting the last bits of the novel in readable shape so that I can mail them out today. Once that's done, I'll resume inflicting nonsense on whoever stumbles through this corner of cyberspace.
*************************
Yesterday morning: when I coaxed myself out of bed around 7, the outside temperature outside hovered around 58 degrees. A gray day, bizarrely mild for November. As I pulled clothes on, something outside caught my attention. Or rather, nothing caught my attention. As in the lack of something. Cranked the window open, what I heard was: nothing. No birdsong, no faint traffic sounds from Route 14 way down the hill. Apart from the sheerest whisper of a breeze against the window, nothing. The absence of noise.
The only other time I've experienced a lack of sound that complete -- outdoors, not in an acoustically manipulated room or enclosure -- was several years back in New Hampshire, during the time when I'd just begun thinking about shifting life from the city to the country. My friend Joe, a long-time resident of a small New Hampshire town, notified me he'd seen a listing for something like 100 acres for a good price, not far from where he lived. He knew where the land was, thought I should take a look at it. A few days later, I hopped onto the interstate north out of the Boston area and made tracks up to his place, a big old house on 90 acres of wooded land, on a dirt road well outside the little town in which he and his wife, Deb, live.
We got into Joe's car, he threaded his way through back roads, each more remote than the last until we were well down one narrow dirt road, past its single residence -– a backwoods special, with rusted cars and dead refrigerators strategically placed around house and property. Well away from any other humans. Until we came upon what was at that time the largest barn I'd ever seen, a mammoth structure put together by whoever had originally lived on and farmed that land, land now unoccupied for so long that had begun reclaiming its original wild state.
We got out of the car, investigated the barn -– a beautiful, gigantic building, built to last -– then walked away from the road and building, down the gentle slope of the land toward trees and wooded acreage. At some point we stopped walking, I took a moment to listen to the world around me, discovering: quiet. No sound. Not the faintest hint of people noise, no sounds from insects in the grass or local birds. Deathly calm, dead quiet. So quiet I wondered if something had gone wrong with my hearing until Joe started back toward the road and the sound of his passage through the grass gave my ears something to latch on to.
Without that ghost of a breeze, yesterday morning would have been just like that.