Today is sweatshirt weather: cold, dreary and damp. I’m watching World Cup soccer-Ghana versus Serbia. I’m not a soccer fan, but I’ll cheer on Ghana. I remember I had been there just a day or two when I saw shoeless young boys in khaki school uniforms playing soccer on a rock strewn field. I watched a while and took a few pictures. It would be the first of many football games I watched when I was in Ghana.

Yesterday I did deck duty. I cleaned the bird bath, the fountain, a couple of feeders and the grill. A squirrel had used the grill to store food. It was filled with empty shells and parts of pine cones. That was the dirtiest of all the jobs, but the deck is now ready for summer. I’m just waiting on the weather.

Yesterday was graduation for the high school from which I graduated and where I worked for thirty three years. Reading about it brought to mind my own high school graduation. It was outside, in front of the school, and the first ever to be held outside. We sat on chairs set on risers with our backs to the front door. Over our heads was a wooden sign painted green with white letters: Class of 1965. We sort of matched the sign. The boys wore green, the girls white. In front of us was the crowd of proud parents and grandparents. I could see my parents from where I sat. My mother waved when she saw me looking. They gave out scholarships that day and my name was called. I remember looking at my father and reading his lips. He wanted to know how much. I ignored him. The guest speaker was from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and he was boring. We whispered to each other to pass the time. There must have been a constant hum from the graduates. At some point during the ceremony the sign fell. It hit one of my classmates who was knocked off his seat to the ground. We all knew what had happened. The news was whispered and passed from graduate to graduate. No one but his seatmates saw him fall so no one checked. Eventually my classmate got up and took his seat. Because he was tall, the victim, was one of the last names called to get a diploma. By then he was fine.