Today is like yesterday, hot and humid. The sun is out for now, but the clouds will be back. It is one of those days. The strong breeze is still here but infrequently. Thunder showers are supposed to come tomorrow. I have my AC blasting, and the house is wonderfully cool. I am not happy about having to go out later, but I must. The car is filled with dump day trash.

When I was a kid, I loved to color. Every Christmas I’d get a new coloring book and a new set of crayons, always Crayola crayons, in my stocking. The number of crayons in the box went up as I got older. The colors got more complex. My first box had 8 crayons. My last Christmas box of crayons was given to me when I was an adult. It is a collector’s tin with 72 crayons in one box and 8 crayons in a reproduction of the first box. All eight crayons were retiring colors like maize, raw umber, orange red and lemon yellow. I didn’t know colors retired until then. I never noticed what was missing nor did I notice when new colors were added. Colors like vivid tangerine, jungle green, cerulean and fuchsia were added, and the new boxes got bigger. The count now is up to 120 crayons. Just imagine finding that box in your stocking.

Crayons were so valuable that we almost never threw a piece away no matter how small the crayon. New boxes came with crayon sharpeners, but they hardly worked for me. We used to keep all our crayons, whole and stubby, in a communal cigar box. There were crayons of all colors and lengths. The shorter the crayon the less we knew about it. When crayons got sharpened, usually with a knife of sorts, the paper was torn away. By the end, there was no paper. Where had fuchsia gone? How about apple red? Nope, the crayons were now simple common colors like red and green and yellow. Subtlety was lost on us.

The morning is hot, almost as hot as the day will be, at 79˚. My house is so cool and comfortable I hate going out at all, but I do have a couple of things on my errand list. I’ll wait until the afternoon if even then.

The dogs drive me crazy. They chase each other up and down the hall and jump on the couch for the turnaround, the same couch where I’m sitting. I get bounced around and whacked by Henry on his u-turn. The floor between the den and the kitchen is again filled with dust balls because of the dogs. I vacuum it just about every day.

Nala brings sticks into the house. I was alerted to this when she had too wide a branch to take through the dog door. It made a lot of noise. She figured it out and brought the branch in sideways. I watched her then threw the branch back outside. I’m tired of vacuuming chunks of bark and pieces of white branch. Nala always chews her sticks on a rug. How neat.

When I was growing up, my town was the world to me. We never went far for family vacations. If anywhere, it was north to Maine for a weekend, and I remember one week we spent in Vermont when I was young, maybe around 8. I didn’t mind staying home in the summer. My friends too stayed home, but I didn’t see them much once school was over. My wanderings were usually when I was alone. I liked to stop and sit for a bit. I’d drink water at one of the bubblers, often the one in the park. Sometimes I had a nickel or a dime for expenses on the road. The nickel meant candy and the dime meant Hostess. I never bought any particular Hostess. That depended on my mood, but I was partial to Hostess cupcakes, It was the cream middle I loved. It was also the chocolate. Sometimes I’d buy a Sno-Ball. It had everything: a cream middle, giant coconut frosting topper and chocolate. I don’t remember the last Hostess anything I bought. I did buy a cupcake at the bakery which they labeled as a Hostess cupcake. It even had the white squiggle across the frosting on the top, but it wasn’t Hostess.

I have always wondered about the frosting on Hostess cupcakes. We used to have to lick the frosting off cupcakes my mother made but never Hostess cupcakes. The frosting came off in one piece. That last part of the cupcakes, the frosting, was the best part so I’d take the frosting off and put it aside then I’d eat the cake. The frosting was the last treasure from a Hostess cupcake.