It is 79° and sunny though the clouds come and go. Rain is predicted for later. A strong breeze comes every now and then but does little to cool the air. I’ve turned on my fan. Nala has stopped panting and has fallen asleep with the breeze cooling her.

I have perfected being a sloth though yesterday I did sweep the floor as the dog hair had formed balls mostly in the hall, and I couldn’t take them anymore. I also had a concert, the usual Monday concert in Hyannis. That was the reason I got dressed. Most days I prefer to sit around in my comfies. My dogs reflect my lifestyle. They are both napping, the first of many naps. They sprawl. They don’t even move when I walk over them into the kitchen. I admire that.

When I was a kid, I never had quiet days, even in the rain. I had the playground with all of its activities, and I had my bike to fill in for any slow spots. I knew the best places in my town. A horse barn was behind the town hall. I used to look in from the open door at the stalls and the horses. The building is still there, but the horses are long gone. I’d walk the tracks. I always jumped over the double O railroad ties so my mother’s back wouldn’t break. That seemed perfectly reasonable to me. My mother never did break her back thanks to my jumping. I kept my heroics secret.

The junkman’s house was near the horse barn. The porch leaned. It had high piles of newspapers. A barn was beside the house. It is where he kept his horses. The clop of the horses on the street and the voice of the junkman calling for newspaper and rags always had me running to watch him go by the house. I didn’t realize back then that the days of the junkman and his wagon were numbered. They would be replaced by trash trucks.

My childhood was on the cusp of the old and the new. We still had that junkman, a knife sharpener on his bicycle with his grinding wheel propelled by the pedals, a milkman with clinking bottles against the metal bottle holder who delivered milk and left it in a case on the back steps and hand propelled lawn mowers which clicked and clicked as they cut the grass. I never thought about them disappearing, and they did disappear, replaced by trucks and machines which had no amazing sounds and no personalities.

The older I get the more nostalgic I am. Mind you, I don’t advocate going back to the old days. I do enjoy modern creature comforts, but I miss the fun of those days, of watching the sparks fly off the grinding wheel, of running to Johnny’s ice cream truck with a nickel for a popsicle, root beer if has one, and watching the horses drop poop on the road. We waited for and laughed at that last one. Every kid loves poop stories.

This entry was posted on July 28, 2026 at 1:18 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.