The silence was most notable. It wasn’t a complete, enveloping silence like that you would experience standing on a field of snow on a still night. No, it wasn’t the complete absence of sound, but rather the emptiness left behind by sounds you know should have been there. Cars could be heard only in the distance. No people talking or kids screaming. But the street wasn’t still. For the first time since the heat waves of the Great Drought, the gentle off-ocean breeze could be heard over the bustling sounds of a great suburb city. That breeze, almost constant in the early spring. It gently caressed the freshly rain-washed city. Ran its chilly fingers along the houses, the people, the trees, as it moved inland. A breeze that carried with it the colors, thoughts, sounds, of the world it whisked its way through before it faded back into the nothingness from which it came. As the whispy tendrils floated down the street, they passed through a great tree, knocking loose a single leaf. The leaf, not dead but yet still a warm, crispy brown danced its way through the air. The leaf is strange. It is the soft, silky sapling of the spring but at the same time the crackling scent of autumn. It is strange how this chill breeze, common to both seasons, has touched a single fragment of nature in the great city that combines the very essence of two opposite ends of the year, opposite ends of the cycle of life swirling through time. Swirling as the leaf does before delicately but surely dropping to float on the mirror collected from the rain at the edge of the street. A pool whose crystal tension reflects the leaf, the wind, the trees, the sky. The stillness. The silence. Incomplete but soaked deep into a world at rest.

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