The day is wonderful. It is 74° which will be the high today. Tonight will go down to the mid 60’s, perfect for sleeping. It is breezy. Clouds are predicted but no rain. I have more house chores today. I seem to be on a cleaning frenzy. I hope it passes quickly.

When I was a kid, summer didn’t start on any date. It started when school ended. The last day of school was a half day. We returned text books, cleared out our desks and got our final report cards. When we were let loose, it was a cacophony of screaming, of pushing each other to get out the door. We’d run down the pathway papers in hand. We were filled with the joys of freedom and of summer hopes and expectations.

In Ghana, school holiday also started in June. Buses usually waiting in the lorry park to fill with passengers came to the school to pick up students heading south. Trunks were loaded on the tops of the buses. I remember students with their heads and arms out the windows screaming goodbyes. They were as joyful at the end of school as we always were. That was my time to travel, to explore more of Africa. Even now, so many decades later, it still amazes me to say explore more of Africa. I think my eleven year old self, the age I was when I vowed to travel, would be thrilled and pleased almost beyond measure.

I joined the drill team when I was ten or eleven. We learned our maneuver all winter in the armory upstairs, usually on a Tuesday evening. I got teased because I used to do a bit of homework when there was a break. I’d bring index cards filled with vocabulary or history I needed to learn. Summer was drill competition time. Our first contest was usually in mid June under the lights in Everett. I remember being a bit nervous when moving from the inspection line to the ready line. One year, the person standing beside me panicked. She said she couldn’t remember a single step because we were at the wrong end of the field. She meant in practice we started at the opposite end of the field. I told her everything looks different under the lights. She believed me. She had no trouble remembering.

My dance card is empty until Tuesday.

This entry was posted on June 19, 2026 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.