The weather has changed. It is cooler. The low today will be 63°, amazing. A cool breeze is blowing in from the window behind me, the north window. The day will be mostly cloudy. The sun pops in and out but doesn’t stay. It is a lazy day.

When I fill out forms and my year of birth is requested, I find myself scrolling further and further down the list, but there are many years earlier than mine, a longer scroll, which I find somewhat comforting.

I seldom wear a dress any more. I used to wear one out to dinner on Easter, but I don’t go out anymore so my dress sits in the back of the closet. Actually, I have two dresses, one for Easter/spring and another for fall/winter. I’m covered for any event. I had a teacher in high school who wore suits. She had two. She alternated. When I lived in Ghana, I had to wear dresses every day. I had brought dresses with me as I knew ahead of time I’d have to wear them, but in a short while I had my dresses made from Ghanaian cloth by a seamstress. I’d buy cloth in the market and when I traveled. I have none of those dresses, but I have some from my trips back to Ghana. They were made by a seamstress in the market.

My grandmother was a terrible cook so my father had peculiar ideas about food. Spaghetti was pasta with a can of stewed tomatoes on top. For him garlic was only okay for garlic bread and shrimp scampi. He preferred canned asparagus. What was funny was if he didn’t see you using garlic in a different dish he’d eat the food and not notice. His eyes, not his taste buds, were the final arbiters on whether or not the food was edible. Once I used the same bowl to mash potatoes which I had used for mushrooms. A few bits of the mushroom ended up in the potatoes. My father was not fond of mushrooms. He wanted to know what the bits were in his mashed potatoes. I told him the potatoes came from Eastham. He ate them.

I have a small chore list today. I need to vacuum both upstairs and downstairs. I don’t want to, but I must. The dust balls of dog hair rise into the air when I walk anywhere in the house. It is almost embarrassing. I do sweep every other day downstairs, but the dust is never ending. I tried to brush Henry. You’d have thought he was being abused. He got away from me and ran upstairs. He stayed there for hours.

This entry was posted on July 18, 2025 at 12:59 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.