The den is still holding last night’s chill. I put on a long sleeve shirt. The room is too hot for hoodies and too chilly for short sleeves. Fall is more and more imminent.

Some moments stay with us. They may be big events or small pieces of a day we never gave much thought too, pieces that nestled in our memory drawers. When I was a kid, things seemed permanent. I passed the same houses on my walk to school for eight years. I jumped over the railroad tracks.

BREAK! I just went outside to check on Nala, and she had a baby spawn in her mouth. I yelled and ran down the steps to the yard. The spawn got loose and ran. Nala ran too, and she won. She ran up the deck stairs with the spawn in her mouth while I was a madwoman screaming from the yard for her to drop it. She was gone from the deck by the time I got there so I went down again looking for her. I didn’t find her, but because I didn’t want the trip to my yard to be fruitless, I grabbed some trash Nala had brought from the house. I carried it up the stairs to throw away into the trash. As soon as I walked inside to the kitchen I was shocked to see Nala on the couch with the spawn between her paws. The spawn looked dead, glassy eyed. I got something to pick up the poor baby so I could unceremoniously drop it over the fence, but the spawn had been playing possum. It got up and ran off the couch. I imagined it taking up residence as there are plenty of places to hide. All I could think of was I didn’t need another pet. Nala found the spawn which ran then just collapsed close to me. I kept Nala at bay and grabbed stuff so I could pick up the spawn. I got it outside the back door and threw it over the side to the grass. It shook a little then ran back to the yard. I shut the dog door. Nala is now napping on the couch, exhausted from her morning adventures.

Okay, I am going to stop here. I will continue tomorrow what I started earlier about moments.

We have our last outdoor concert in Hyannis today. If you have a little time, bring a chair to the Hyannis green and enjoy a wonderful ukulele concert. We start at 5: 30.

Deep grief is quiet. It settles in the heart. It stays there. It softens but never disappears. My circle gets smaller as I grow older. My grandparents left first. My parents and my aunts and uncles left next. No one ever tells you how awful it is to lose your parents. The hole never closes. I have lost dear friends, as close as family friends. Last week I lost the closest, but she had been disappearing. She had Alzheimer’s. Yet, I was surprised when she died. After I heard, I just sat and everything disappeared, all my thoughts, all my feelings. I couldn’t grab hold of anything. Now I can sit with my memories. I laugh a lot.

Yesterday I visited my former neighbors who had moved from next door to a larger house and yard. They came from Brazil years ago. We sat and chatted. We drank mimosas and ate plantain and Brazilian linguica. It was a wonderful afternoon, a perfect time to be with friends.

Labor Day is late this year which is a good thing as it always signals the end of summer. School starts here just after the holiday. The tourists hang round, but fewer are here during the week. The weekends stay busy. The tour buses start. We won’t get the cape back until November.

Today I am seeing a play with a friend, the musical The Girl from North Country. Tomorrow is the last Monday concert of the summer. We always play Irish music last. We dress in green and wear fascinators with shamrocks or leprechauns. It is a lively concert. I’m glad for lively.

The weather has been delightful. Right now it is 77°. I love the view outside my window. I can see the sunshine through the oak leaves on the tree closest to the house. From in-between the top branches I have glimpses of the blue sky. The air is quite still. It is a quiet Sunday.

I know. I know. It is later than usual. I admit I allowed my sloth to drive. I took my time on the paper and all the puzzles (which I successfully completed), ordered my groceries and paid some bills. I even brought some trash to the car and dusted a couple of shelves. All of this was done with not a list in sight, and I am not even finished. I have more I want to do today including vacuuming the tumbleweeds of Henry fur.

When I was a kid, I was never really into clothes. I was into comfort. The only exceptions were when I was a teen, and I wore the uniform of every teen especially one year, the year of stirrup ski pants and fluffy sweaters. My sweater was pink. My pants were black. In Ghana I had to wear dresses every day. During my first year I had several made with Ghanaian cloth by a seamstress. That was for when I was in public. In the house, after my shower, I wore comfy clothes. I really didn’t complain so much about the dresses. They were cool in the heat. For most of my professional life here I wore dresses and skirts. I was not a fan of either. My winter comfy clothes were hoodies, pants and flannel shirts while in summer I wore mostly short sleeve shirts and exchanged my shoes for sandals. Around the house I wear t-shirts and casual pants, not fit for the eyes of the outside world. My inside clothes are often worn in places and have holes, but I don’t care. My fashion sense ends when I walk into the house.

Today is hot and partly cloudy. Nary a breeze blows. I have the fan going here in the den. It is cool enough. Both dogs are sleeping. Earlier they were both panting, Nala far more than Henry. Poor boxers don’t abide the heat well. Nala is asleep beside me and enjoying the fan. I don’t mind sharing.

I have always loved summer nights. In the field below my house fireflies flitted and darted, their flames blinking as they flew across the tall grass. I used to sit on the embankment above the hill and watch. I’d try to follow one firefly. I found out in my trusty encyclopedia that both males and females blink. The males blink to attract females, and the females blink their responses. Their flashes sync. When I was really little, I thought fireflies were fairies, relatives of Tinker Bell. I could hear from beyond the field the sounds of frogs and crickets on the swamp. The sounds were really songs, quiet, rhythmic songs. I used to love to fall asleep listening to them.

I have fireflies in my yard and frog songs from the tiny pond at the end of my street. Because they are there, I still believe in fairies and night music.

The day is lovely. The few clouds don’t obscure the sun. It is 80°. A breeze is constant and cooling. Lately the nights have gone down to the 60’s, wonderful for sleeping. These lower temperatures are previews of fall and warnings that summer is closing. Fall is nudging.

My friends and I often went to the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. We yelled lines and brought props. It is still a favorite film of mine. I love the view of the heels on the elevator as it descends, and that first look at Frank-N-Furter’s face. I even have an old vinyl soundtrack album, and I saw the play in Boston. Tim Curry was the most amazing Frank.

When I was a kid, I loved movies, especially science fiction movies, the old black and whites from the 50’s. They had a plot formula. Most aliens wanted Earth. Creatures destroyed cities and ate people whole. Pandemics killed people or turned them into zombies. Ordinary creatures like spiders or ants became enormous. They too ate people. They kept their creature characteristics which made them scarier. Spiders wove huge webs big enough to catch people. Ants dug holes for their queens. There were pirañhas and alligators and sharks. The water creatures had enormous teeth. They too ate people. I was not a kid easily scared by all these creatures. I really enjoyed these movies, still do. I search for them and hope to find one I haven’t seen or saw so long ago I don’t remember. When I do, I pop the corn and while away the evening watching.

I have always been an egg fan. My mother used to make us eggs in egg cups on winter mornings. She’d cut the toast to fit the top of the egg. I didn’t know the formal name for these eggs was soft-boiled eggs. She’d also make dropped eggs on toast. I was older before I learned they were actually poached eggs. She used to make them in boiling water. She always made sure the yolks were still soft. She’d sometimes make egg salad for Friday’s school lunch. I only liked the salad if it had celery and lettuce. Egg salad needed crunch. My mother’s peppers and eggs were the things of legend. My friend used to make the best deviled eggs. My fridge always has eggs.

I have a concert today. I had one yesterday. Today it is the Beatles.Yesterday it was the Beach Boys.

The sun is bright, the sky blue and the small breeze refreshing. I woke up from my hibernation just before noon. I had gone to bed when morning light was making its appearance. Nala woke me up. She was at the bottom of the bed crying. I figured she wanted out so I dragged myself out of bed and opened the door. She ran outside. Speaking of Nala, I did guess that the mouse motel trap which had gone missing from the kitchen had been stolen by Nala. I ventured another guess and figured a mouse was inside when Nala saw it so she took the whole trap to the yard. She knows to hide her swag. I was going to look for the trap, but it rained for a few days and then I forgot. Last night it reappeared in the hall. It was dirty inside and out. One end was partially opened and the plastic on the bottom of that end door had been chewed. I think it was the mouse trying for freedom, but I’ll never know its fate.

This is one of those where is my muse days. I’m watching a video of a street market walk in Accra. These are local markets, and every day is market day. It is loud, a babel of voices. Most are speaking Twi or Fante. Tables line the sidewalks. Aunties are selling their merchandise. If you want yams, rice, tomatoes, fruit, onions, ginger, carrots, cloth, pots and pans, clothes, baskets, buckets, palm oil, kenkey, canned mackerel, spaghetti, peppers and so much more you can shop at any table after table selling the exact same goods. Mostly women walk in the small spaces between the tables while carrying goods or buckets on their heads. Cars are carefully driven in the streets made narrow by the tables on each side of the road. In another market the tables are three deep along the sides of the railroad tracks. Goats are sleeping between the tracks. The train doesn’t run there any more. People are rummaging through piles of used clothes. When I lived in Ghana, they called the clothes obroni wawu, translated as dead white man’s clothes.

I have a busy uke week. I also need to do a dump run, vacuum the upstairs, wash floors and polish furniture so dusty I could sell advertising space on it. I think I just saw my sloth walk down the driveway with a suitcase in her paw.

The day is perfectly lovely. It is 80° with a strong breeze from the north. The den is dark and cool. This is a busy week for me with ukulele just about every day, four concerts, practice and a lesson.

I found a book in the back of my bedroom bookcase. Finding it was happenstance as I was looking for something else. The book, Dorothy Lamour and the Haunted Lighthouse, had been a stocking stuffer. What made this book special was its publishing date, 1947, the year I was born. The book was published by Whitman Publishing, the company in which I invested my weekly 50¢ allowance when I bought mystery books like Trixie Belden and Donna Parker. I started reading my find. The book is dated but readable. The pages have yellowed.

My father used to tell us stories. They involved men with hooks instead of hands and things that go bump in the night. I was not so much frightened as wary. A strange noise in the house gave me pause. I listened but nothing ever came of it. The wind banging against the windows had my imagination running wild, andI was alert for one of those things that go bump in the night, but I never saw anything. When I walked home in the dark, my footsteps echoed on the sidewalk, and, just in case, I would check behind me. No one was ever there. At some point, when I was older, I didn’t notice the sounds anymore. I didn’t look for shadows. I stopped being wary.

I still have a strong imagination. My coffee maker is a Black and Decker. You lift up the top to add the coffee grounds and the water. When the top is up, it looks just like Darth Vader’s helmet, black and with the same shape. The good thing is it doesn’t talk or make breathing sounds.

When I asked Alexa the weather around 2 this morning, she told me the rain would start in 11 minutes. She was off by only a few minutes. The rain started quietly. It was still raining, a little more heavily than last night, when I woke up this morning but has since stopped. It is a damp, cloudy 72°.

Sunday has never been my favorite day. When I was a kid, I was stuck. I had to go to mass then hang around the house until Sunday dinner and then maybe, after dinner, travel to my grandparents’ house. With school the next day, I had to go to bed early. I never understood that. Every other weekday night my bedtime was later. I guess my mother figured my routine had been disrupted by later to bed Friday and Saturday nights so I needed to be retrained. Sunday was a ruin of a day.

In grammar school, I had nuns every other grade except both sixth and seventh when I had regular people both years. I had some really good teachers and a couple of bad. My first grade teacher, Sister Redempta, was scary. Nobody talked and nobody moved without permission. Everything was regimented. My classroom was on the first floor of the old school. The room had two doors, giant windows and a cloakroom right outside the classroom. There were so many of us desks filled every available space. You had to walk sideways up and down the aisles. We moved row by row to form a line when we went anywhere like to the bathrooms down in the cellar area, or to the schoolyard for recess or to the cloakroom at the end of the day. Nuns seemed to embrace the line as the best mode of movement.

My eighth grade teacher, Sister Hildegard, was the worst. She was also the oldest, too old for eighth graders. We ran amok. One kid, whose name I think was Luke, used to spill milk in the waste basket, show Sister Hildegard and volunteer to wash the basket. Out he’d go with the sabotaged basket. He’d be gone for an hour. Sister Hildegard never noticed how long it took or that it happened sometimes three times a week. I admit I also took advantage. I’d hide my lunch then leave for lunch. I’d arrive back late. Other times I’d ask permission to leave early telling her I needed to go to the library. She always let me go.

She hated all of us. She told outlandish stories, sort of a nun’s version of Aesop fables. I remember she told us about a couple of kids who skipped out of mass and both were hit by a train. Another story was about a girl who was not a Catholic who stuck her tongue out at the Blessed Sacrament. Her tongue stayed stuck out until she converted. Sister Hildegard told us she was going to write one message on the blackboard in the largest letters she could when we graduated, “Thank God they are gone.”

The rain has finally stopped, but the day is still cloudy and dark. Everything is wet, even my kitchen floor has muddy dog prints. The dogs, meanwhile, are on the couch enjoying their morning nap. They are exhausted after having been awake for an hour and a half. Speaking of dogs, I think Nala has been up to her old tricks. I noticed a mouse had taken up residence in the kitchen. I put down the mouse hotel and kept checking. I caught and relocated said mouse. I reset the hotel and kept checking. On day three the hotel had disappeared; the whole thing was gone. The choices were limited. Either several burly mice had moved it across the kitchen floor and hidden it in another room or a yet to be named culprit saw the mouse in the hotel and carried the whole thing outside. I lean toward the last guess, but the rain has kept me from checking the yard.

When I was a kid, I filled most summer days. I was always busy. The only stop was for lunch, either I went home or ate the sandwich I had brought with me, always bologna on white bread. Sometimes I included cookies with my lunch, always Oreos. Amazingly my taste hasn’t changed since then. I’m quite content with a bologna sandwich but usually on other than squishy white bread and Oreos though now I lean toward double stuffed and lemon. I always consider that lunch the grass roots of my palate.

My mother always cooked hearty foods. For supper, they’d be meat, mashed potatoes and a vegetable. She cooked what she knew we and my father would eat. He was a bit picky. To him, garlic only belonged with shrimp scampi. Mashed potatoes were served straight, no seasonings except salt. He loved canned asparagus, fresh ears of corn and green beans, canned of course. I once served him a pork roast with garlic cloves in slits around the roast, He loved it, but he caught my mother cooking the same dish, and he had her remove the garlic. He wouldn’t eat it he said. It was mind over matter.

When I was in training in Ghana, getting sick was part of the experience. Early on, during the first two weeks, we had so many shots at one time most of us got reactions. I watched a line of red travel up my arm. I had a fever. Diarrhea was common among us trainees because of the different foods we were eating and the water we drank, but I did not get it. I survived six weeks of fairly good health, but then it happened. It was so bad I sat outside the bathroom doors all night as I knew I’d never make it from my room even at a run (pun here). It lasted only a couple of days, but would reappear occasionally during my two years. At no time was the culprit ever identified.

I have an empty dance card today I’m going to stay in my cozies and be comfortable. I have a book I’m reading and a jigsaw puzzle to finish. I am now back in control of my TV. The new remote came yesterday. I do not have to watch Midway again.

The rain started around 2:00 this morning, and it is still raining and will keep raining. It is a dark, menacing day. The temperature is only 67° and it won’t get much warmer. I’ve shut a few windows in what feels like a vain attempt to keep the chill out of the house. I’m wearing long sleeeves.

I have a few errands. I was also adding the dump to my trip, but I’ll wait for a dry day, probably tomorrow. Elsewhere on the home front, My TV remote refuses to remote. It won’t work the TV at all. I am stuck on one channel, and wouldn’t you know, I have seen all the movies it has been airing. Right now it is on round two of those same movies. I tried everything to get it to work but failed so I have ordered a new remote which should arrive today. Meanwhile, I am watching Midway again. I wonder who wins?

Things have changed. Here I am complaining about a remote which doesn’t remote while when I was a kid, I was the remote. If my father wanted the channel changed, one of us would get up and change it. When I was in Ghana, I made do. I didn’t bring anything electric except my cassette player. I had to use a hand opener for cans. The iron was charcoal heated. I had no stove but rather a charcoal burner, sort of like a hibachi but round. I survived all of those and decided I really didn’t need all the electrical appliances. That didn’t last long. The electric can opener came first. I have a microwave, no charcoal necessary. I have an electric coffee pot, no more instant coffee and boiling water for it on the charcoal. I didn’t even have a fan in Ghana. Now I can’t live unless I have my fan and my AC after it gets repaired. I fell into the trap of easy living. It is a pleasant, easy trip. I have no regrets. One thing, though, is the same. My electric can opener died, and I didn’t replace it. I use the silver hand opener the world used to own. I suffer through it.

The day is hot, in the low 80’s, and it will stay hot tonight. That August heat is the reason it is my least favorite summer month. Adding to the misery of the heat is the humidity, thick damp air which just hangs. My father always described it as so thick you could cut it with a knife. Right now it is sunny. but rain is predicted for this evening, an 88% chance of rain.

I never dreaded going back to school. By the end of August, summer had worn down. The playground was already closed, and I was left to my own devices to fill the days. My mother had taken us school shopping with stops for new shoes, a new skirt and blouse for my school uniform and new school supplies. We were just about ready. The last thing was the bath, an out of time bath, a bath on a Tuesday night.

One of the skills I learned in Ghana was how to pluck a chicken. I haven’t plucked one since. One year we bought three or four chickens for Thanksgiving because we could only find one turkey, not enough to share. Someone else dispatched the birds. We put their caucuses in a metal container about the size of a small trough. They didn’t run around without their heads, but a few bodies kept jumping out of the trough. A few even flapped their wings. We knew the biology behind it, but it was creepy nonetheless. After all that activity, we plucked their feathers, pulled off the pinions and got them ready for the fire.

This is the month of the spiders. Even the tiniest of them is weaving webs, but, unlike Charlotte, mine don’t weave messages. I’ve never been afraid of spiders. I think it a bit silly that people scream and run when they see spiders. I save them. Sometimes I have to move a spider from the sink if it gets trapped. I do clear webs as they seem to be everywhere joining anything. One giant web hung down from the ceiling, and others went across the lintels of the wooden doorways. Some of the webs remind me of the end of the movie The Fly, the original movie from 1958. The fly with the head and one arm of the scientist is caught in the web. The spider is inching toward that fly which is screeching, “Help me. Help me.” The spider didn’t look all that real, but the abject fear on the man’s face was horrifying. I can still see it in my mind’s eye.