Right now it is 20°. We have snow showers. Last night was even colder, down to the teens. What was frozen is still frozen. The birds are at the feeders. When I filled those feeders yesterday, I had to walk across the frozen deck. I went ever so slowly. For the rest of the day, I was a sloth.

Every morning my Alexa wakes me up at 9:30 with a cheery good morning. She tells me the time, even though it is the same every day. She tells me the weather, the high and the low, for the day. She gives me a random fact. Most mornings I then get out of bed. Alexa does her job well.

In Ghana I didn’t have an alarm clock. I had my students. Every morning was filled with sounds. They cleaned the school compound before their morning bucket baths and before their classes. I could hear the swish of the hand brooms as they tidied the ground. The brooms were short and made from grass. You had to bend over to use one. It was the sweeping outside my window which usually woke me up. My students kept my dirt tidy. I could hear chatting though I didn’t know what my students were saying as they spoke to one another in their own languages. Students stood in line for their bucket baths. I could hear the sound of the water when it first hit the metal buckets. That was the last morning ritual.

I love walking around inside my house with all the lights lit. The tree in the living room is my favorite. It does have a dark spot because I couldn’t put the star on the top of the tree, but that’s no nevermind. The scrub pine tree in the dining room has one of the old plastic Santas and an old candolier with three orange bulbs on the floor in front of it. They are two of my favorite decorations. Both of them bring me back to Christmas when I was a kid.

I remember each of the two windows flanking the picture window had a plastic candle with fake plastic candle drippings. The picture window had a five candle candolier. All the candles had orange bulbs. It seemed every house had orange bulbs in the windows. My sister thinks that the orange makes the light look like a flame. I think she’s right. The candoliers were in a plug difficult to reach so we turned the candles on and off by twisting the bulbs. On was easy. Off was not so easy as the bulbs were hot. We used to lick our fingers first so we wouldn’t get burnt.

I remember it was a race to the windows to turn on the bulbs. The race was a bit slower to turn them off.

This entry was posted on December 22, 2024 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.