Last week the construction crews finally finished replacing the gas lines and tearing up and resurfacing our street. The often-noisy work had been going on daily since mid-May. They even rerouted the buses for a month so the work could be completed more quickly.
In the afternoon on the day they laid the final layer of smelly, steaming asphalt something eerie happened in my neighborhood…silence.
I’ve lived here for more than 20 years, and even after the worst howling blizzards cars and buses will still find a way to chug up our street. Even during the construction when the crews were finalizing the surface for paving, the occasional dimwit driver would ignore the cones, barrels and ROAD CLOSED signs and fly up the street trying to pass a working front-end loader or grader. But not this time. The cars and buses obeyed all the signs to stay off the cooling asphalt.
For almost 2 hours the only sounds that hit my ears were bird calls, cicadas and the breeze ruffling the oak leaves. It was magical and at the same time freaky. There were no mowers or blowers or trimmers, no music from passing cars (because there were no passing cars!), no ambulances howling in the distance, no kids chattering as they played in their yards, no dogs barking and no airplanes flying overhead. I didn’t even hear any traffic from the nearby highway.
It was almost as if everyone had left the city without telling me. It was two hours of pure bliss.