Sunday Escape

Early this morning I awakened and heard the sound of rain drilling off my metal roof and falling to the deck. I reawakened some six hours later and was met with complete silence. At my house, high in the Sierra Nevada mountains, silence in winter means one of two things: the total cessation of rain or . . .

Snow. My first snowfall of the season.

I looked outside to witness the largest snowflakes I'd seen in 14 years. These were not your average flakes; oh no. These were Hollywood Flakes of the first magnitude. The kind of flakes you'd envision if you were to write a book about Christmas. They were light, fluffy, Genetic Mutant kinds of flakes, ranging from an inch to almost three inches in size and girth. They were not Danny Devito flakes, they were Yao Ming flakes.

It looked to me as though people were having a massive pillow fight many hundreds of feet above my house with the resulting stuffing wafting slowly, so slowly down.

It was absolutely gorgeous.

Sometimes I feel so isolated up here and that is precisely my goal at times. I can do what I choose when I choose. I can ignore the trappings of modern society because the house is surrounded by pines and a few scattered houses. At the top of my street, for example, the owners there have two horses in a corral. In the summer, with windows open, I could hear them give the occasional distant whinny -- mixed with the occasional nighttime horns from passing high elevation trains.

No intrusive, orbiting police helicopters with NightSun lights, no sirens, no thump trucks or thump cars from First, Second and Third World hiphop dipshits. No police pursuits; no fire trucks responding. No burnouts from various Rice Rockets of the two and four-wheeled variety. No public transit buses passing. No public transit whatsoever. No passing traffic. No arguments and fights from the apartment complex next door. No apartment complex within 30 miles of me. No series of continuously-barking dogs from all my next door neighbors. Only one dog nearby, and I know him. He and my local feral cat friends, of whom I am slowly winning over -- along with my own "inside" cat named Mose. Not to mention my irascible raccoonie buddies.

Just total and complete silence.

Silence.

What a new and unique concept.

So I can either tune into The World via the standard http://www quotient or radio waves or, when I choose, I can simply ignore whatever I wish. Sometimes I get no choice; my DirecTV "tunes out" when the rain or the snow becomes too thick. Hence my large library of DVDs.

Today, I chose to ignore The World.

Because, for me, the falling snowflakes were miracle enough.

I guess you could call this an Escape.

Do you have an "escape?"

BZ