We have sun. It has become a lovely day, but a fall day at 64°. My house is even a bit chillier. The nights have all been in the 50’s, not cold enough yet for the leaves to change. The weatherman is predicting a nor’easter at the end of the week. Those storms bring strong winds, heavy rain and a wild surf. We on the coast get hit the hardest with the strongest winds and a higher tide. Sand is carried by the wind and beaches erode. They are terrific storms.

I have always been mesmerized by storms. I remember the hurricanes when I was a kid. I’d watch out the window. The wind was so strong the trees and bushes bent. The wind was loud, frightening. The old wooden windows rattled. The rain pelted against the glass. I remember the giant elm which stood across the street went down in the 1954 hurricane, Hurricane Carol. I heard it fall. Branches from other trees littered the grass and the streets. Yards were a mess. I remember my father got to work right away cleaning the yard. We helped by piling the branches we could carry. The best part was the small bonfire when my father burned the debris. It filled the air with that wonderful smoky smell, and the firelight shined in the late afternoon.

I remember the start of the rainy season in Ghana. It hadn’t rained for months. The ground was sand. The fields were empty. We knew it was coming when the days started to get humid. The nights got warmer. I remember one day when the sky got dark with grey-black, angry looking clouds, which darkened the day. When the rain started, it was torrential. I saw a lightning bolt strike the ground in front of my house. It looked like a kid’s drawing of lightning with crooked lines of light. It was so unexpected I jumped a bit. I had been watching from my small porch in the front of the house. I decided to go inside prompted by the lightning bolt and the metal roof of the porch.

I didn’t write any lists or chores for today. I seem to ignore them anyway. I’ll end up doing something impromptu, something which catches my eye. I do have my uke practice tonight. That’s it for sure.

Yesterday with all its rain has made for an ugly today, a damp, dark day. It is only 61°. The breeze is at times a wind. Being inside in my comfy clothes is cozy and warm. The dogs are napping beside me. The coffee is great. I like my morning.

This week I am attending a special event, a drill team reunion, a reunion of St. Patrick’s Shamrocks. I joined the junior drill team when I was ten. We never competed. We just learned how to march. We did that at the armory on Main Street, a brick building with a pool table, a hall filled with unit flags, offices and a wide empty room upstairs. It is now a hardware store. When I was part of the senior drill team, we practiced upstairs. Every Tuesday we learned our maneuver for the summer competitions. We were all friends. We went to St. Pat’s together. We grew up together. We stayed friends though we didn’t see other often though I do keep in touch with my friend Maria. She is the one who took the lead to get us all together. She and I started in the junior drill together. We have some fun memories. The best one is when we were fooling around while someone was getting help in marching and no one was watching us. Maria hit the floor and made enough noise to get yelled at while I just stood and looked innocent. I do that well, the innocent thing. She still blames me. I deny it and will always deny it. This denial drives her crazy so I do it often.

When I was a kid, I never wanted to learn things like sewing, crocheting or cooking. My mother tried to teach me, but I just wasn’t interested. It was in Ghana when I first baked cookies and sewed anything. I had a wall of windows in my bedroom, louvered windows. I wanted more privacy so I bought some cloth in the market, measured the length of the windows and cut the cloth. I used string underneath a sort of top hem which I sewed by hand with giant stitches. I then strung the curtain by the string across all the windows and attached each end to a part of the window. I thought it looked great as long as you looked from the outside or not too closely inside. I remember the curtain cloth was brown with decorative sections on the top and bottom and a plain light tan middle.

I baked sugar cookies for my first Christmas away. I had to make a 200 mile round trip for gas so I could use my oven. I hauled my gas cylinder by bus. The cylinder was bulky and oh so heavy when filled. I had cookie cutters from home my mother had sent me. I used a beer bottle as a roller. It took me a while to make the cookies and bake them, but it was all worth it. They were delicious. They were the start of my love for cooking and baking; however, the curtain wasn’t enough for me to want to sew anything beyond buttons.