The morning is already 79°. It is also humid, but we do have a strong breeze spinning the air. Regrettably, today is the start of a really hot spell. We’ll get into the high 80’s and, by Wednesday, the low 90’s, uncommonly hot for July here. I am so glad I now have a fan.

Henry is still limping, but he seems to be in less pain. He gets his pills and spray twice a day. I hide the pills in food, but he tolerates the direct spray. Yesterday he did his usual barking at the door, and he slept on the couch beside me for a while last night, all Henry things he hadn’t been doing. The vet did say the limp could take as long as five weeks before it goes away.

When I was a kid, my world was filled with so much to do. My neighborhood was a kid’s paradise. In the summer, the small field of grass below the hill near my house got high. It always turned brown. It was filled with small grasshoppers. I remember chasing them and trying to catch them in my hands. I also remember the brown guck they’d leave on my hands. We thought it was grasshopper poop. We never kept the grasshoppers. It was the hunt and chase we loved. The summer swamp was spotted with algae and had sewing needle bugs flitting across the water. We thought they’d sew our eyes. Trees surrounded the swamp on three sides. On the longest side, a small canal led further into the woods. I don’t know why, but I never looked for the end of those woods and how far the swamp went.

Blueberry bushes along a hill path filled with berries. We never collected them but rather ate them off the bushes. They were big, juicy berries.

What sticks out in my memory is the trunk of a dead tree with one branch still connected to the tree but lying on the ground. It was beside the end of the path to the swamp. We never walked around the limb on the path but climbed over it instead. Kids always take the most interesting way, not the easiest.

My favorite summer lunch back then was a bologna sandwich. My mother bought bologna in a roll so I had to cut it into slices, and I never cut it well. It was usually thin on one side and thick on the other. We always had Wonder Bread which was so soft it sort of fitted around the slices so you could see the lumps. I slathered the meat with yellow mustard. I had to hold the sandwich with both hands.

On my dance card this week are my usual uke events, a concert on the Hyannis green tonight and one in Brewster on Wednesday with songs of the sea music. I have my practice and my lesson. The special event is this Saturday, the Uke Fest with two lesson workshops and an evening concert. It is a busy week.

This entry was posted on July 13, 2026 at 12:57 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.