Is this a dead zone just now, before the end of summer? Business is apathetic and zombified, football is just getting started up, schoolkids haven't started yet (mostly), and everyone is waiting for a gun to start the race?

Working from home -- usually interrupted -- I don't hear any lawnmowers or hedgetrimmers going, only a few far-off trucks on the highway somewhere. It's weird.

I don't hear any cicadas, either. Yet it seems hot enough, and time for them.

When I was a teenager, on a silent day like this I might be lying on a lounge chair in the back yard in the sun. The clouds would take their time moving aside to let another blast of hot light bake us, and you'd sigh with the great feeling of the heat. Or I might be walking to the stores or the pool or library or the woods.

As an adult, I stay inside because, you know, the cancer risk, and feel as if I must wait for something but not sure what. This waiting must be what kills a little bit more of my life every day. Even animals don't need prompts from the weather to get them moving; they get up to search for food, or to keep moving away from predators, or whatever. But I have a kitchen so I don't need to go foraging. And no one is hunting me today.

I wait for buyers to contact me; for my coworker to let me know updates; for the wind to change.

............Well, that doesn't work. Time to change my internal channel, get some coffee, turn on the radio, move.
But I liked that silence while it lasted.