The rain started late. I heard it hitting the window. The dogs went out anyway. It was a warm night, still 55˚ at two. The wind got wilder just as I went to bed. It was a stop and listen sort of wind, fierce and loud. Branches brushed the window. The last sound I heard before I fell asleep was the howling.

The morning was cloudy, but the sun broke through a bit ago. I can see the blue sky expanding and chasing away the clouds, a bit of a treat for a little while as the forecast is for scattered showers. It is 55˚.

Yesterday was my errand day. I even went to the dump. Today is an around the house day. I need to finish clearing Nala’s trash from the backyard. I’ll get to use my bright yellow prisoner trash stick again, and I’ll take down the Christmas flags and check my little library. (Oops, outside is on hold. The sky is dark and threatening. Rain is coming just as forecasted.)

My dafs are in bloom. Their bright yellow is striking. I am tired of brown and grey. It is time to celebrate the awakening of gardens and the warmth of spring.

When I was a kid, I remember walking to school on chilly mornings this time of year. Instead of winter layering, I wore a sweater under my spring jacket. I think I skipped to school.

My mother was the consummate April Fool’s Day joker. She was tricky. She always got my sister. I was wary when she’d call me. She was that good!

When I was a kid, I always gave up chocolate for Lent, but I never made it all the way through to Easter. The call of chocolate is too great. I tried to think about other things to sacrifice, but I had none. My mother nixed giving up vegetables. Giving up church was out of the conversation. I didn’t want a mortal sin, that blackened milk bottle in the Baltimore Catechism. I gave up nothing for Lent. Besides, I was never big on the concept.

I have been buying old black and white science fiction movies for summer viewing. It is time to reopen movies on the deck. I’ll start with a classic, maybe Beau Geste, the original, then move on to my new movies. Yesterday, The Monolith Monsters, a 1957 film, was delivered. Black rocks from a meteor crash are strewn all over the town. When they interact with water, they become gargantuan towers of rock which petrify anyone in the way. They can move by collapsing and then reforming. On the back of the cover is a wonderful description. Their path of destruction must end before they plow mankind into a stone-cold early grave.

The wind is so strong it blows open the dog door. Henry gets spooked so I have to get up from my comfy couch to let him in by the human door, and Henry doesn’t wait patiently. He bangs the door with his nose. Right now he is napping, probably because of the trauma of having to wait outside a couple of minutes.

Today is an ugly day. It rained earlier, and the sky is still covered in clouds, but today is warm, even with the wind. It is in the mid-50’s. I have errands today. One of them is easy to guess.

Nala likes to play fetch, even in the house. I throw toys down the hall, and she brings them back to me. She also brings in stuff from outside. The other day it was a pine branch. The needles on the floor of the living room and the hall gave Nala away. The dirt on the door mat and in the kitchen also gave Nala away when she tore apart my succulent garden. It was left counter after I had watered. I thought it was safe. Silly me forgetting Nala, the Destroyer of Worlds, loves surfing the counter.

I almost feel like a grave robber. Nala pulled apart a Santa cloth ornament she had stolen a while back. Sadly, Henry is complicit in this theft but after the fact. He also enjoys chewing poor Santa. This morning I found white stuffing on the floor. I followed the tufts from room to room and caught Nala trying to pull out some more from Santa’s head. I grabbed the ornament and pulled out all the rest of the stuffing from Santa’s head leaving him a shell of his former self. During all of this, Jack was meowing for attention.

When I was a kid, I never knew how to answer when aunts, great aunts and my aunt the nun, whom I seldom saw, asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. It usually took me days to decide what to wear on Halloween let alone decide what I’d be doing the rest of my life. The enormity of that question floored me. I had no idea I was supposed to be planning my future. I still thought Saturday was a long way off. I usually said I didn’t know. That ended our once a year chat.

Winter has decided to hang around for a while. Right now it is only 31˚ and won’t get much warmer, the only flaw in an otherwise lovely sunny day. Not a cloud is in sight. The trees are still. The dogs stay out long enough that I check to make sure neither has escaped though it is only a courtesy to check Henry.

I like jam. I am not a great fan of jelly though I still have a fondness for Welch’s jelly in a cartoon character glass. I think I have one or two in the cabinet, Tom and Jerry glasses. I used to slather too much jelly on my PB&J sandwiches. It always seeped through in the middle and made for an ugly sandwich, a tasty but ugly sandwich. My father loved strawberry jam. I always gave him a couple of jars in his Christmas stocking. I am not particular though I do have a favorite or two. I eat a variety of jams, usually whatever I find when I scrummage through the cabinet. My favorite of late has been black mission fig jam, a Christmas present, but I finished the last of it and have moved to strawberry jam with huge chunks of strawberries.

In Ghana I bought groundnut paste. It was sold in the market and was the base for groundnut stew, but I used it mostly as groundnut butter, peanut butter in American English. It was thick and had to be thinned with groundnut oil or it tore the bread. I bought imported jam. PB&J or GN&J was my favorite snack.

Peanut butter is a stable still. I love a snack of peanut butter and jelly on a Saltine. It has to be a Saltine, a preference carried through time. We always had Saltines. I crushed them into my chicken noodle soup, my Campbell’s chicken noodle soup. Sometimes I buttered the crackers. Other times I used Marshmallow fluff instead of jelly. They were the messiest combination, but that was my favorite. I mean, seriously, what could beat the taste of fluff and peanut butter? The one use which makes me gag at the thought of it is sardines on crackers. I can still see, as if in a bad dream, the opened can, the wound metal top with a key and the sardines in a row. I’d take one and eat it on my Saltine. My sister remembers doing the same. It was my father who introduced us to the joy of eating sardines on Saltines. The three of us would nosh together. I think maybe that was the draw.

I used to give my father a really expensive can of sardines in his Christmas stocking. He was always delighted and offered to share.

Today is an ugly day, an ugly winter’s day. It is downright cold. Right now it is 32˚with a here and gone wind. The dogs come inside with cold fur and really cold ears. The sun isn’t expected today.

The dogs perfectly performed the door shtick. They both tried to go out the same time and both got stuck in the dog door. I unsympathetically laughed before I pulled Nala back so Henry could get outside. Speaking of Nala, my convict trash pick-up stick has arrived. It is a bright yellow. If the wind dies a bit, I’ll clean the trash in the yard today.

Yesterday morning, my coffee maker wouldn’t turn on. I pushed the button up and down and up and down again, nothing. I was in a panic faced with the thought of no coffee. I pushed the button hard up and down again a couple of times. The light came on then went off. With my vast electrical experience, I knew it had to be a short. I pushed the button up and down over and over driven by the need for caffeine. The red button came on and the coffee started then it went off. I did the button thing and got it to turn on but was stuck holding the button until it held. This morning, the coffee maker turned right on and stayed on. It is perplexing.

Mostly I am not afraid of things. I get nervous and wary, but that’s usually where I stop. I have never understood people, sadly mostly women, running and screaming when they see a spider, a beneficial arachnid. My neighbor is afraid of bats. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a bat around here so fearing one seems a bit of wasting one’s psyche. He says bats suck blood out of people’s necks. He’s seen it he says. I do understand a fear of clowns. I mean, really, look at Killer Klowns from Outer Space and any reiterations of Pennywise.

I know my house and all its sounds. At night, I sleep through those sounds, but I’ll wake up immediately at a different sound and listen for it. Rain is one of those sounds. I’ll hear drops hitting my window and roof, sometimes big, noisy drops. A gagging dog is another of those sounds, the grossest I think. Wind wakes me. A barking dog jolts me awake. Most times, once I identify what I heard, I just go back to sleep.

My house gives me not only comfort but also a sense of refuge, safeness. It has always been that way, but now I have an extra layer. Henry, the barker, alerts me to stuff I don’t hear or see. I figure any potential house breakers hearing him will bypass my house. Henry isn’t kidding. Nala follows his lead. I am thankful.

Today is lovely and warm, okay, warmish, at 48˚. The breeze is every now and then. The deep blue sky has white, puffy clouds, cumulous I think, close to the horizon. They remind me of the clouds I used to draw and color with my white crayon, one of that crayon’s few uses other than Santa’s beard. I think I did my best work in clouds.

I tempted fate earlier and went to get my paper without wearing my sweatshirt. My arms were cold. I hurried. Today is dump day, and I will be appropriately clad.

My pick up trash stick, with a nail at one end, is being delivered today. All I need is an around my shoulder trash bag, an orange jump suit and a sheriff’s car following me.

When I was a kid, Sunday was different from all other days. It had a tinge of the sacred about it. The day started with my wearing a dress and my Sunday shoes to mass. In those days we all dressed for mass. I remember wearing a lace mantilla instead of a hat. I also remember seeing women with white Kleenex on their heads, their version of hats. Bobby pins kept the Kleenex attached. The Kleenex perplexed me.

We used to hang around the house watching TV and waiting for dinner. I always loved our Sunday dinners. They were the special meals of the week. We usually ate around two, the magic hour. We always had mashed potatoes. My mother made gravy from the roast drippings, and I remember making a hole, more of an indentation, on the top of the mound of potatoes to hold the gravy. It was a bit of a contest between me and the potatoes.

Sunday was a family day. The stores, except for a few corner stores and a gas station here and there, were closed. In the winter we visited my grandparents on some Sunday afternoons. They lived in East Boston. I remember my father dropping the rest of us off while he hunted for a parking space. In summer, we often went to the beach for the day. Sometimes we went on a Sunday ride. My father always took back roads, never the highway for those rides. I remember farms and cows and horses. I remember stopping for ice cream at one of the local creameries. My father loved vanilla ice cream. I had no allegiance to any flavor. I loved sugar cones the best even though they often developed a dripping hole at the point of the cone. I usually didn’t realize there was a hole until the ice cream dripped on my shirt. I remember putting my finger on the hole to keep it from dripping. I felt like the Dutch boy with his finger in the hole of the dike.

Bedtime was early on Sundays. We’d watch TV, lots of western back then, and beg my mother to let us stay up a bit later, but we never won that argument no matter how cogent we were. It was a school night was all my mother had to say. We dragged our feet all the way upstairs to bed.

The clouds are still around, but the day is warmish at 53˚. The trees are quiet. My neighborhood too is quiet now. I say now because around 4:30, yes 4:30 a.m., I was reading in bed surrounded by the dogs when I heard a noise from outside so I sat up and listened. I heard a turkey gobbling probably from my front yard. The dogs didn’t hear it or they didn’t care about a bird. The gobbling went on for a while. I was tempted to get out of bed to go downstairs to look, but the dogs were asleep, I had room in the bed, and I didn’t want to test fate so I turned off the light to the sounds of the turkey.

When I was a kid, I was thrilled to see wildlife. On family car rides we’d yell out even when we saw just cows. I remember thinking how funny skunks walk with that little waddle. I also remember running from that funny, waddling skunk. On one ride, we yelled when we saw some deer eating in a field, their heads down to the grass. My father stopped so we could watch.

We used to go to Maine to my father’s friend’s cottage in Ogunquit. It was a tiny place where every available space had beds. I remember sleeping behind a wall in the kitchen which hid a bed. The wall went up and down. One Sunday, I woke up early before every one else and went outside. Another friend of my father’s who had a cottage was there. I said hello, and because I was the only one awake, he invited me to go with him to a monastery for mass. I did. It was a most amazing morning. I remember every bit of that experience, but I don’t remember the man’s name. He was old, at least to the young me. He wore a suit and a fedora. We chatted. He pointed out places as we drove through town to the next town, Kennebunkport, to the monastery. I remember the chapel. It was old with stained-glass windows, finished wooden walls and statues in darkened wood. The pews sloped a bit. The monks wore brown. They sang during the mass. Their voices were beautiful. My father’s friend gave me a quarter for the collection. I was used to a dime. On the way home, we stopped for donuts, hot chocolate and coffee. As we drove pass the harbor, I saw seals and did my look at the animals yell. He stopped the car, and we ate breakfast watching the seals.

That is one of my best mornings.

Yesterday it rained all day, heavily at times. Today is a leftover day with light grey clouds but no rain or wind. I have no errands to do though I could do a dump run, but I’m thinking of saving that until Sunday. It will give me something to look forward to say I tongue in cheek.

Both dogs are upstairs asleep on my bed. They are a strange pair. Henry growls at Nala if she scares him or walks by him when he is in a bad mood. I pat him to divert his attention. It usually works. Last night, just before I turned off the light, Henry growled at Nala because she was lying on his spot in the bed. I told him to stop. He did then started cleaning her face side to side, probably out of guilt. After she’d had enough, she got up and moved right beside my head, her usual spot, and settled on the other pillow curved in ball. I turned off the light.

When I was a kid, we learned to hide under our desks and cover our heads or curl up in the hall to save us from a nuclear bomb. Hiding under my desk was a little scary. I knew what a bomb was, but the nuclear part was fuzzy, but I did what I was told without a real understanding of the why. When I was older, the drills stopped. By then I understood why we had hidden under our desks, but an atomic bomb was still remote from my day to day. It was for somewhere else, not here.

I remember President Kennedy announcing on TV the blockade of Cuba, a quarantine to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies, more missile parts. The US would seize weapons off any Soviet ship attempting delivery to Cuba and would retaliate on the USSR should any missile be fired from Cuba. The stand-off lasted thirteen days. We all waited. We were all afraid. On TV the news was constantly dire. We kept hearing that Cuba is only ninety miles from the US. I remember too there were Soviet ships boarded and searched, but when nothing was found, they went on their way while other ships turned back before boarding. That was the first time I was glued to the TV. I remember reports about Soviet ships on their way to Cuba. I remember Walter Cronkite, I think, announcing the ships were turning back. We could all breathe again until the next crisis and the next and the next. There is always a next.

The rain started around 2:30 this morning. It started staccato. I listened for a while then turned off the light and fell sleep. The dogs woke me around 8:30, and it was pouring. I let the dogs out, yes, I am the one, and went back to bed. They were asleep on my bed when I finally stirred close to noon. I am a sloth without the toe nails.

The darkness the rain brings always feels somehow comforting. I am dry and warm in my house. The lamp on the table gently lights the room. The dogs on the couch beside me sleep soundly with only an occasional sigh. I can hear my heat blasting. I checked the news and the weather. Both are unsettling, the news the worst.

This morning I had coffee and an English muffin. I had no cream but did have almond milk in the oven. It was part of my emergency stores; actually, it was the only emergency store. The English muffins were flat from packaging. They are a brand new to me. I used the last of my black mission fig jam. The almond milk tasted just fine and so did the flat muffins covered in fig jam.

President Biden is in Brussels. My sister and I reminisced about the trip we took there with our parents. We stayed at the Hotel Amigo right off the Grand-Place. It was exquisite and about as far as you can get from a hostel bunk room and a shared bathroom. It was during this trip my father unceremoniously gave me the keys to the rental. He never drove on any of our trips again. It started from the airport. He was lost, didn’t know where we could find the hotel. I gave him directions. He wouldn’t listen as I had never been in Brussels before this, but I had seen signs to the center of the city, and I knew that’s where our hotel was. He finally listened, and we easily found our hotel. The trip which broke the driver’s back (sorry, it is the best I could do) was the trip to Bruges. We ended up in Waterloo. We went to the worst museum I have ever seen. They had cones on the floor around the puddles. There were empty display cases. It smelled musty. We left laughing. We did find a really good museum in Waterloo, and we eventually made it to Bruges. I drove.

The last story I’ll tell is on me. On that same trip we went to Bastogne. We ate at a restaurant in a hotel where the Americans had stayed during the siege of Bastogne when it was surrounded by Germans. My father and I ordered boar. When the waiter brought the food, he asked who the two boars were. My mother and sister roared laughing and pointed to my father and me.

The day is pretty. It is sunny and calm but chillier than it has been; it’s only in the 40’s and won’t get much higher. I do have a couple of errands so I’ll venture out. I have been taking Nala with me, and she loves the car. I don’t know if I am brave enough to bring Henry. He hates the car.

When I was a kid, if we didn’t do what my mother told us, she always threatened to tell my father. He was the hammer. She knew it. We knew it. When I was older, my mother took to throwing things. I remember my dictionary whizzing through the air. Nothing ever hit us. She knew that. We knew that. We were safe until the flying slipper. My mother wore slippers during the day. She started throwing the slippers. They were close at hand. She missed every time then she told one of us to bring the slipper back. We knew that was a bad idea. The slipper was no longer just a projectile. It had become a weapon. If one of us returned it, that good soul would get whacked. We were quick to solve the slipper problem. We threw it back, gently. My mother wasn’t happy. We were. We ran in the opposite direction. She yelled at us she’d tell my father.

When I was in high school, my father worked away on weekends. He came home Friday nights and left Monday mornings. We were waiting until the end of the school year to move. We’d greet my father then meet my friends and head out for Friday night doings. I had no curfew so I was never late; actually, I made sure to get home early, but when I got home, I still had to fill out what my brother and I called the curfew card left on the desk. Both my parents were in bed so they had left the note on the desk asking us to sign in and write down the time. We complied. Nothing ever happened.

Today is a spring day. The bright sun is framed by a cloudless, deep blue sky. The morning air has a bit of a chill, but, in typical spring fashion, the day will get warmer. I’m going to clean the backyard so it will look less like a vacant lot. Nala has been busy stealing trash and secretly taking it through the dog door. I caught her once yesterday with a box in her mouth. She dropped it and jumped when I yelled, but the odds are in her favor. I seldom catch her.

Henry is asleep on the couch. I know that doesn’t sound revolutionary, but my house cleaner is here, and Henry doesn’t care. He isn’t following her and barking. That’s the revolutionary part. Also, Henry has mastered the dog door. He stands outside and bangs the door, but I ignore him so he comes in on his own. That is also revolutionary.

When I was a kid, I walked more than I rode my bike. All week I walked to and from school. On Saturday mornings, I walked to the armory for junior drill. On Saturday afternoons, I walked uptown to the movie theater. When I was older, I still walked. On weekday mornings it was to the bus stop with a reverse walk in the afternoons. In the early evenings, on Tuesdays, I walked to drill and later at night I walked home. I never worried. I grew up feeling safe.

When my parents moved off Cape while I was in the Peace Corps, they couldn’t find a key to the house. It was never locked. I think they finally found the key in the junk drawer with all the other odd objects.

When I was a kid, I loved riding my bike to school. The bike rack in the schoolyard was under trees. It was wooden and painted green, the perfect color for St. Patrick’s School. I never had a lock, but I never worried about my bike. I knew it would always be there in the green bike rack at the end of school.