The rain started late last night. By 2, the wind was fierce and loud. This morning I found part of my front fence down. It has some rot anyway, but the wind helped it along. I lifted it and reconnected as best I could. I’ll have to call my factotum. Right now it is warm at 44° and foggy. The rain stopped a bit earlier and probably will not be back until much later if at all. My sister who lives north of Boston had rain now turned to snow.

Today is a perfect day for movies, black and white science fiction movies. Right now it is Stranger from Venus from 1954 starring Patricia Neal.

When I was a kid, I had only a couple of pairs of shoes. That seems to have been all I needed. My school shoes doubled as my church shoes. The rest of the time I wore sneakers. I remember the toes of my sneakers were sort of pointed. The sneakers were white and usually dirty. I did have snow boots that went over my shoes but not without a huge struggle. My solution was to pull my feet out of the boots first then pull my shoes out. I did the reverse going home.

In elementary school I got graded for silent reading. I always did well, always A’s. I never thought about how that grade came to be. Later I figured if I had moved my lips or had moved my head from line to line I’d have done poorly.

I remember the warm-up writing exercises for Palmer Method: the circles, the loops and the straight up and down lines. My circles were closer to squares. Sometimes I smeared my lines. The ribbon for Palmer Method always remained elusive.

In the seventh grade I was told a long held life fact. It was a non-nun year so I had a teacher. She was oldish, at least in my eyes. I remember trying to get one of the basketball hoops in the school yard for girls to use during recess. Many of us played CYO basketball for the parish so it made sense. That teacher told me no and wondered if I had my friend, a euphemism for getting my period, yet. I didn’t, but I also didn’t understand why that precluded us from playing basketball and told her so. She said once I got it I would understand. I never did.