Yesterday it rained then it stopped then it started again. The rain was so soft I wasn’t sure at first and had to lower the TV to hear it. It was the same this morning. It is not a pretty day. It is a muggy, damp and cloudy day.

We had the entire encyclopedia with the maroon covers when I was a kid. My mother bought a volume a week from the grocery store. I used to pick one book at random, open it and read wherever I landed. I used the books for research for school. I used to mix up the words so my papers wouldn’t seem copied. The grocery store was also where my mother got her dishes, her melmac dishes, the ones decorated with what looked like wheat sheaves, the ones which were indestructible. She used to buy the pieces of the week. My mother also collected green stamps. One of us would lick the backs and place the stamps on the booklet pages. When my mother had enough booklets, she’d go to the green stamp store to redeem them after deciding her sort of prize. The other day I was driving home from a concert in Hyannis. At a red light, while I was idling, my memory drawer opened. The green stamp redemption center had been right beside the road where I was. I could see it in my mind’s eye. A laundromat is there now.

When I moved into my house, I had almost nothing. My aunt gave me a set of pots and a frying pan as a housewarming gift. The outside of the pots was green. I still have one of those pots. I don’t use it anymore. I think of it as a relic of the earliest days of a nearly empty house devoid even of furniture and treat it reverently. When I had the phones installed, the phone man said I seem to be living almost primitively.

This is a slower week for me. I have empty days. I’ll never complain about that.

This entry was posted on August 18, 2026 at 12:28 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.