I am sitting in the dark trying to keep the heat at bay. It is already 80°. The morning haze has disappeared. The sky is blue. The air is quite still. It is a quiet morning. The dogs are napping. Henry still limps, but he is no longer in pain. He is back to himself. He does his usual circles waiting for me to open the door. He jumps up and down while waiting for his food. He smiles again.

Strangers talk to one another in lines at the supermarket, and the weather always starts the conversations. It is a safe conversation starter. On Tuesday a woman at the nurse practitioner’s office, a woman I was just meeting, mentioned to be that this heat is better than shoveling snow. She was quite old, older than I am anyway, so I figured she was speaking proverbially. I doubt she ever shovels. I mentioned I preferred the winter mostly because it is easier to get warm than it is to cool down on a hot day. That was the entirety of our conversation. My father always said there was something about me which invited conversations. He didn’t see that as a compliment. It is no coincidence that when learning a new language, any language, the first things we learn are the conversations, the hellos, the how are you’s, the ice breakers. In Ghana, language was often an impediment to conversations, but when I used Hausa to greet people, I got smiles and responses. The Ghanaians were always surprised a white woman could speak Hausa.

When I was growing up, families were mostly the same with multiple kids, fathers who worked and mothers who stayed home. Just about everybody had only one car, the family car, which fathers drove to work every day. My mother didn’t learn to drive until we moved to the cape where driving is a necessity as nothing was close, and there wasn’t any public transportation. We became a two car family.

A couple of summers, I went to Girl Scout day camp. It was at the scout cabin in the woods, Camp Aleska. I waited on the corner for the camp bus. I brought my own lunch. The days started the same, raising the flag at the morning ceremonies where we sang and recited the scout pledge. The days were filled with activities. The cabin was surrounded by trees, mostly pine trees and the air smelled amazing. Below the cabin was a wide trail where we hiked. It was always shaded by the boughs of the giant pines. Two mornings a week we took swimming lessons at the town pool. I already knew how to swim, but we had to go. Many days we did crafts, some using pine cones we salvaged from the woods. We made popsicle stick crafts. We used Elmer’s glue to keep the sticks together. The glue clumped, and, sometimes my fingers got stuck to one another. We learned to make some campfire foods, like hobo stew which we cooked over the charcoal fire pit. I loved hobo stew. The days always ended with us lowering the flag and folding it until the next day.

I have an empty dance card today and tomorrow. On Saturday I have a full day of uke, lessons all afternoon from a well-known ukulele player, Jim Beloff, and a concert in the evening by him. I can’t remember the last time I had a full day of anything.

This entry was posted on July 16, 2026 at 12:21 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.