This morning was a mirror under the nose morning. I slept until noon. The last couple of days I have been really tired so, as my mother used to say, “You must have needed it.” The dogs too must have as they stayed with me in bed. They are napping now. Jack, the cat, is also napping now. They lead tough lives.

When I was a kid, I never slept late. On school mornings I had no choice. My mother had us up, breakfasted and dressed with plenty of time left for walking to school. We never walked fast. We chatted and we dawdled. I loved that walk. The sidewalk had towering trees beside it the whole way. In every season the trees decorated the walk. In fall the leaf colors were mostly yellow with just a few reds. In late fall, leaves would cover the walk, and we’d plow through the piles and kick them into the air. In winter the bare branches were shadowed on the walk and looked like arms and legs. In the spring the trees were filled with green leaves which towered over the sidewalk. The houses were close to the sidewalk. They were old houses with big front windows. When I visited my hometown a long while back, I took that route. I was sad to see many of the houses were gone, replaced by an apartment building and houses which all looked alike. I know things change over time. I just don’t have to like it.

I remember learning to tie a bow. My mother taught me. She used a giant bow to make it easier for me. She also taught me to ride my bike. It was on the street in front of my house. I still remember the joy of riding by myself for the first time. I learned to tell time when I was in the second grade. My aunt helped. I didn’t know it was part of her plan. She gave me a Cinderella watch for my first communion and wanted to make sure I could read the time. I still have an analog watch. I choose not to go digital.

When I was young, the world felt safe. I could be by myself on my bike anywhere. I could walk alone all over town. The only advice my mother gave me was not to talk to strangers. I was always in the present. Kids usually are. The furthest away I ever looked was Christmas. That took a lot of planning.

Saturday is a fine day, my favorite day since I was a little kid. Back then I was usually out and about every Saturday, sometimes with a destination in mind while other times I just meandered. All through time, Saturday has stayed much the same for me. I still think of it as a day to enjoy, to have no chores or errands. Today I have a concert. I get to play my uke.

The weather this morning is a mix of sun and clouds. The sun, in its turn, is bright, squint your eyes bright. Everything seems to shine, almost glitter, in the light. When the clouds take their turn, the day is a bit darker. It is in the low 40’s right now. Light rain is predicted.

When I was little, my mother used to read to me, usually a Golden book. My favorite was Chicken Little aka Henny Penny. Many years later my mother gave me a Chicken Little book in my stocking. After I read it, I was horrified. Everyone pretty much gets eaten. Somehow I’d forgotten that part.

Today my muse has gone hither and yon. When that happens, I rely on stories of my travels. Most of our family vacations were either the stay at home sort or a visit to Maine where my father’s friend had a tiny cottage. In Maine, the water was too cold for swimming, and there was nothing much to do all day. The home vacations were my favorites. We often went to museums or to the beach for the day. We went to the drive-in. The town had a pool and a couple of times my father took us night swimming there. You had to have an adult with you at night so the pool was never crowded. One time we went to New Hampshire. My father drove up Mount Washington. It was a spectacular ride. I could see right over the edge, and it was a bit scary. At the mountain top it was cold. We also saw the Flume, the the most amazing gorge and waterfall that was so loud you couldn’t be heard. We saw the Old Man of the Mountain. He’s gone now. He collapsed. The only place you can see him is on New Hampshire license plates. We did all that in one day. My father was never one to waste time, even on a vacation day.

The day is pretty. The sun has poked through the earlier morning clouds. The sky is blue and the sky is cloudy. The wind is now and then. It is in the 40’s. My front lawn, deck and driveway are hidden by the fallen leaves. More browned leaves still hang from oak tree branches waiting for the wind. The days darken early. The nights are cold. Fall is moving on.

When I was a kid during this time of year, I hated that the afternoons were getting shorter and colder. Darkness came early and triggered the streetlights. My mother didn’t care about the time, only the streetlights. We were well trained so right away we’d go inside. We’d watch TV while my mother made supper. We always ate at the kitchen table. My mother filled our plates and handed them to us. She also cut the meat. We were young.

My mother bought Welch’s grape jelly. It came in a glass with cartoon characters on it. I sometimes put it on crackers but mostly used it for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I remember the bread in the middle of the sandwiches sometimes sank in and turned blue from the jelly. The counter got sticky if any jelly fell off the knife. If I didn’t clean it, I’d hear it from my mother. My father always loved strawberry jam so my mother bought it for him. He loved his snacks, butter or jam on crackers. Royal Lunch Milk Crackers were his favorites, and he was devastated when they were no longer made. He then switched to Saltines.

I don’t remember when I stopped eating grape jelly and switched to jam. I think of it as the first step into adulthood, the laying aside of childish things. It was a tiny step albeit but a step nonetheless. Right now my favorite is Mission Fig Jam. I just finished my last jar yesterday. Life can be cruel.

Yesterday was a busy day. I am not a lover of busy days. I guess it is the sloth in me. Yesterday was also cold, wintry cold. I was out twice for my uke, a morning lesson and an afternoon concert. We are still in the bluegrass book. We start Christmas practice next week. My big chore for today is organizing all my Christmas songs.

I have a few records from my childhood. They are yellow and red and include Frosty and Rudolph. I used to sit in my room, play my records and sing along. We learned Christmas carols, the religious ones, in school. We used the John Hancock book of Christmas carols. The books were small and the covers had a winter scene including a church with giant stain glass windows and a night sky covered with stars. I still have one. I put it out every Christmas.

I have many vinyl Christmas albums. Some of them were give-a-ways. A couple are from Firestone Tires, a shop that used to be on Main Street. The music is familiar, but the singers aren’t always.

Sometimes I am surprised at how old I am. I notice most when I try to do things I used to do easily. I am also taken aback at how wrinkled I am. My face has tracts of wrinkles. My arms have wrinkles that look like they could use a bit of ironing.

My mother used to trick us. I believed everything she told us. I remember she told us our tongues turned black if we lied. She also told us only mothers could see the liar’s black tongue. Little did we realize the liar gave himself away. She’d ask a question then she’d ask us to stick out our tongues. The liar always covered his mouth. We were surprised she caught the liar every time. I don’t remember how old I was when I realized how crafty my mother was.

One of my favorite snacks was Saltines covered with butter. Sometimes I’d dip them into soup. An oil slick would appear at the top of the bowl. It wasn’t colorful as the ones at gas stations were. It was really a butter slick. Every now and then I still buy Saltines, and I still slather them with butter.

Today I will vacuum downstairs and water the plants. That’s enough.

Today is winter. It is a drab day with a temperature of 38°, the high for the day. I could feel the cold when I opened the back door for the dogs. They didn’t stay out for long. I do have a coat for each of them, but they are not out long enough to need one. Nala’s coat was once Gracie’s. She wore it on every winter walk. Henry was fitted for his coat. He doesn’t like it, no surprise there.

When I was a kid, my mother was the arbiter of cold weather garments. She was a firm believer in layering. No one told her back then. She just knew, one of those mother things. I wore a sweater under my winter coat. I wore heavy socks, sometimes knee socks. I wore pink long underwear which came to my knees. The final touches were a scarf, my wool hat and my mittens. By the time she’d finish dressing me in the morning very little of me was open to the cold air, but all of this warmth came with a price. I had to take everything off at school except my sweater.

The classrooms in the old school had tall radiators below the long windows. They hissed and gurgled and steamed. They were the background sounds every cold winter’s day, but after a while, we stopped hearing them. On the coldest days, the windows were steamy, wet.

The windows at home sometimes had a layer of frost from the radiator steam. I used to write on the frost using my fingernail. I remember the steam hissing from the radiator under the window at the foot of my bed. Sometimes it also made a banging noise. They were the sounds of winter.

The sun was here earlier, but it has since retreated behind the clouds. Today it will rain. It is 56° but the breeze makes it feel colder. Much earlier, I stood on the deck for a while just to take in the morning. Leaves were being blown. I could hear the dogs crunching through the fallen leaves in the backyard. I could hear birds.

Every day I have a chore list, or maybe I should call it the chore list as it has become a permanent list, the same every day, as I don’t finish anything on it despite my great intentions. That used to bother me. It doesn’t anymore.

My dance card is, as usual, uke-centered, but with one exception. Tomorrow is shot day. I’m getting two. Starting Tuesday I have uke practice, a lesson on Wednesday and concerts on Wednesday and Saturday. I hate getting dressed for so many days in a week.

Last night I went through the pictures of my time in Ghana. The bus to the airport picture reminded me of my last phone call to my parents. It was the night before the bus and the flight. My mother cried about a sweatshirt. She said I had left it on the bed, and while she was folding it, she thought about not seeing me for two years and not folding another sweatshirt. My father said don’t worry if I want to come home, but I knew I wouldn’t. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew. They told me to write and let them know I had arrived safely. I promised I would. I did.

I am so very young in all those pictures. I was twenty-one when I arrived and turned twenty-two before the end of training. I had wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer almost half of my life. I was excited about Africa, but I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, but I think I would have felt the same no matter where I was going. I didn’t know anyone who had been in the Peace Corps or even wanted to be. I was on my own. That was scarier than anything. As we stood in line to check in, we chatted. Come to find out we all felt pretty much felt the same way. That was our first bond, and we hadn’t even left yet, but we had something together. I wasn’t on my own anymore.

The rain started last night. I don’t know when it stopped, but it will rain again during the afternoon. It is warm at 56°. The sky is a white gray. The trees are still. (The sun just broke from the clouds. The sky is getting blue.)

When I was a kid, Saturday was the day my dad did dad stuff like bringing his shirts to the laundry, the Chinese laundry uptown, having his hair trimmed in the small barbershop with only a couple of stools and visiting his friend Pullo at the drug store. I remember Pullo, the owner and pharmacist, had a mustache and always wore a white shirt, the sort Dr. Casey wore. The drug store was small, but it had a soda fountain with a few stools. If I was with my dad, I sat there, spun the stool and drank a coke, a vanilla coke. Saturday afternoon was when my father did his chores. They were always outside chores, like mowing and raking the lawn in the summer, planting flowers in the front garden and in the fall, raking and burning the leaves. In the winter he shoveled if we had snow. Sometimes he’d visit his parents who lived in the same town. He’d come home with a bag from his mother: a carton of cigarettes and some sort of candy like fruit slices. Saturday evening, after our traditional New England supper, he’d watch TV.

Friends I grew up with still live in my old home town. My sister lives there too, around the corner from where my parents lived. I don’t visit. I used to when my parents were alive because I could bring the dog. Now, with two dogs, I’d have to hire someone to feed them and let them out, but I worry about Henry. He doesn’t abide change, and he is a barker. He scares people. Nala is a jumper, a kisser. She’d be fine. Boarding too is a possibility. But for now, I have no plans to leave the cape.

I had to call my insurance company. I have just started a new medication which replaced one I was on for years. Instead of once like the old one, I take it twice a day. I put the bottle on my table so I’d remember. I suspect you know where I am going with this. The next day it was gone. I knew it hadn’t grown legs. I knew right away who took it. I went into the back yard to Nala’s usually spot for pilfered goods. It wasn’t there. I looked all over the yard, no bottle. Inside the house I checked under furniture in case it had rolled. No bottle. It was the dog ate my homework story, sort of. The woman at my insurance company was wonderful. She over-rode the old prescription and okayed the payment for a new one. I said I was sure this was a strange one. She said no. It happens more than you’d think, and people often forget where they’d put their prescription bottles. That comforted me. I’m not there yet.

My morning had such a late start it blended into the afternoon. I’m only now having my second cup of coffee. The day is cloudy bright. The breeze is slight. It is 50°, typical for this time of year. Having no need to go out, I am staying home in my comfy clothes. The dogs have been in and out but are now on the couch for their naps, the first naps of many.

When I was a kid, life was easy. School was my only obligation through I never saw it that way as I really liked school. I loved learning, except for arithmetic. It was my bugaboo. I used to hide my fingers under my desk for counting when I needed them to finish an arithmetic problem. I remember learning to carry a number. I’d put the number on top of the problem and say carry the one or whatever the number was so I’d remember. We had to memorize the times tables. That was easy. My favorites were one, five and ten.

I remember coloring turkeys during art. The nun passed out a single paper with the outline of a turkey. We had to color it. That may sound easy, but most of us had only see a turkey plucked, cleaned and ready for the oven. We had to guess the colors. I remember his tail. I made it look more like a peacock’s tail with tons of color. His body was brown. I signed my masterpiece and brought it home for the fridge, a Thanksgiving decoration.

I don’t remember exactly who it was, but I do remember the horror when she found out the stuffing went into the butt of the turkey, not the head. I remember the bags in the butt were filled with the neck, the heart, the liver and the gizzard. I didn’t learn until I was older that they are called the giblets. My mother baked the neck, and my father ate the meat on it. She never used the giblets for the gravy though I knew other people did. She cooked the heart and liver for the dog. My mother always cooked the stuffing in the bird. Everyone did back then. She made great stuffing and used Bell’s seasoning for the flavor. I remember we had to send some to my sister in Colorado as back then they didn’t sell it in the grocery stores.

One mouse last night, and I didn’t reset the traps. I’ll do that tonight. I did sweep today, and I do have plants to water. I could do so much more, but I won’t. I’ll save some for another day or for many days.

I’m sitting here looking out the window at a pretty day. The sun is bright, glaringly bright, at least for the meantime as clouds are waiting, biding their time. The wind is blowing even the biggest branches. Yellow and brown pine needles cover the already fallen leaves. Even the driveway has disappeared. Outside, the dogs crouched when the wind was the strongest. Now it is their nap time.

Last night I trapped two more mice. They are small. I don’t know how long they were in the mouse hotel, but they ate the bait. I let them go. I’m thinking under that bed in Jack’s room is like a clown car only with mice instead of clowns.

My dance card is empty. I already had my uke practice and lesson so now I’ll stay home to rest my leg. It is so much better, finally. I wish I knew what I did to injure it so I won’t do it again. There are a few oddities in my life. I love red licorice, Twizzlers, but not black licorice except for Good and Plenty, black jelly beans and black Chuckles. I do love the taste of anise, especially Italian anise cookies. My uncle used to make the best anise cookies. He always saved some for me at Christmas. I’m not one into schmaltz, but I do love Hallmark movies. I like that each movie ends happily. I’m a sucker for Christmas movies. I love music, but there are singers I’ve never liked, no complaints about my list please. I have never liked Elvis, Neil Diamond or Barry Manilow. Others are on the list but none are as prominent.

I am a purist when it comes to coffee. I drink coffee from all over the world. I love the different nuances. Ghana was a glaring exception. It is a tea drinking country, a former British colony. I had to drink instant coffee with canned milk, an abomination, but I had no choice. After a while my taste buds went numb, and I didn’t notice. When I went back, it was still the same. Everywhere I stayed served instant coffee in little packets with packets of sugar and canned Carnation milk. It is still an abomination but being without coffee is worse. My taste buds knew what to do. They went numb.

Today is another lovely day. We are in the mid-50’s. We have a strong breeze. The sun is sharp, glaringly bright, the way it is this time of year. Many branches are bare while some just have hanging dead leaves. Fall is becoming a memory.

My friend was older than I by a decade. She was a bit stubborn and used to do things by herself which she shouldn’t have. Her son would have done whatever she needed, but she didn’t ask. I’d be after her to have the heavy stuff done by me or him. She ignored me. I get it now. To do it yourself is a form of independence, of still hanging on to the reins. Yesterday I put in the other storm door. I carried it up the stairs from the cellar, through the living room then lifted it into the front door. It went so easily into the door I had to save my curses for another day.

During the fall, my father did all the getting ready for winter chores. Every Saturday he’d rake. He used a green metal rake. A few of the teeth were bent. I remember the sound of that rake, the sort of grating swish. My father would rake over and across and build a giant leaf pile as he raked. The pile would be raked down the small hill, the same hill we rode our bicycles down, across the sidewalk and into the gutter. He’d set fire to the leaves and stand and watch as they burned. The smell of burning leaves is one of my fondest memories. My jacket would hold the aroma.

The small front garden was cleared of the remains of summer flowers. Only the dirt was left. It was bare and drab, but I knew Christmas lights would be soon be on the bushes and brighten the garden for a little while longer.

Next, the storm windows replaced the screens which were then stored in the cellar where the storms had been. First, my father washed the dusty windows, he was big on clean windows, then while carrying a storm, he’d climb the ladder. That was always suspenseful. Would he make it? Would the window make it intact? The hard part, the scariest part, was when he’d reach the window frame on the house and had to use both hands to angle the top of the storm onto the hooks at the top of the frame. It took a few attempts. I know from whom I learned my cursing.

My dance card is fairly empty this week with just the usual uke events. On the mice front, I forgot to report the other night. There were two. Last night there was only one. That brings the total to 10. I didn’t set the traps last night. This mighty hunter needs a break.