Yesterday it rained then it stopped then it started again. The rain was so soft I wasn’t sure at first and had to lower the TV to hear it. It was the same this morning. It is not a pretty day. It is a muggy, damp and cloudy day.

We had the entire encyclopedia with the maroon covers when I was a kid. My mother bought a volume a week from the grocery store. I used to pick one book at random, open it and read wherever I landed. I used the books for research for school. I used to mix up the words so my papers wouldn’t seem copied. The grocery store was also where my mother got her dishes, her melmac dishes, the ones decorated with what looked like wheat sheaves, the ones which were indestructible. She used to buy the pieces of the week. My mother also collected green stamps. One of us would lick the backs and place the stamps on the booklet pages. When my mother had enough booklets, she’d go to the green stamp store to redeem them after deciding her sort of prize. The other day I was driving home from a concert in Hyannis. At a red light, while I was idling, my memory drawer opened. The green stamp redemption center had been right beside the road where I was. I could see it in my mind’s eye. A laundromat is there now.

When I moved into my house, I had almost nothing. My aunt gave me a set of pots and a frying pan as a housewarming gift. The outside of the pots was green. I still have one of those pots. I don’t use it anymore. I think of it as a relic of the earliest days of a nearly empty house devoid even of furniture and treat it reverently. When I had the phones installed, the phone man said I seem to be living almost primitively.

This is a slower week for me. I have empty days. I’ll never complain about that.

The weather is ugly. It is dark and damp. Off and on rain is predicted. My concert has been cancelled. The weather is too iffy and too chilly. That gives me another sloth day, my second in a row.

I was born the same day my aunt, my mother’s older sister, was having her wedding. The hospital was in the town where my grandparents and my aunt lived, the same grandparents who would move to East Boston. My father went back and forth from the hospital to their house to give updates and to have coffee. My aunt complained constantly. He was ruining her big day as she needed sleep so my father ended up sitting alone in the maternity waiting room. When the nurse came in and asked if Mr. Ryan would identify himself, my father yelled about being the only one there and who did she think he was. She announced my birth. My father ran to the hall and saw my mother and me just after I had been born. That was my entry into the world.

From this side of my eyes, I feel young. I also feel lucky at having lived an interesting life. When I was growing up, I had hopes, expectations. The last thing I wanted to be was average, part of the crowd, one of many walking in the same direction. I wanted to follow my hopes and experience the world in different ways than anyone I knew. When I was ten, I made an album of my travels. That I hadn’t been anywhere didn’t matter. I cut out pictures from magazines and travel pamphlets. I described where I’d been and what I’d seen. I even had pictures of airplanes taking me to exotic places. I showed the hotel rooms where I’d stayed. I wrote a travel log on each page. I wasn’t dreaming. I was predicting.

The two years I spent in the Peace Corps in Ghana were the two most important years of my life. Even though I was leaving behind everything and everyone I knew, I was excited to go, but at first I was homesick, unhappy being so far away from home. I didn’t expect that, but I held on, and by Christmas of my first year, Ghana had become my home, my safe place, my cherished place. I was fulfilling the hopes of that ten year old who glued pictures of her travels in her scrapbook.