The morning is cold but gives hint of a warmer day. The sun is bright, the sky a cloudy blue. The air has the aroma of burning wood. I was struck right away by how much it felt like a Ghanaian morning during the harmattan when the air was downright cold and filled with the sweet smell of burning wood from the compounds outside the school grounds. They were my favorite mornings.

My car had a dusting of snow on the windshield and the back window but barely enough to cover. There must have been flurries earlier. The high today will be 34˚. The wind is slight.

I made no lists for today. Yesterday I was busy in the house, and I also hauled boxes and bags to the trunk which had finally defrosted. The dump is closed until Wednesday, and my larder is full so I have no reason to go out and about. I have a new book I got for Christmas just waiting to be read, the new Patricia Cornwell. I have everything I need.

I used to like to color. Every Christmas I always got a new coloring book and crayons. Sometimes my mother and I would sit at the kitchen table and color together. She beautifully shaded the crayons so there were light and dark colors. I was a bit blunter with my colors. My favorite colors were the reds. My least favorite color was white. You could never see it on the paper, only feel it. I only remember using it for Santa’s beard and fur and for clouds.

We always had construction paper in the house. We’d use it for all sorts of crafts and projects. I remember we used to draw on the different colored papers then we’d cut out our drawings. We’d glue popsicle sticks to the backs of our cut-outs using more than enough white glue, and we’d make puppets of a sort. I remember stick figures were my specialty. Females wore skirts, the only way to differentiate between my male and female stick figures.

I always liked sticking my fingers into the bowl to mix flour and water to make paste so we could sculpt with the papier-mâché and strips of newspaper. We used balloons covered in papier-mâché to make piñata’s one year. They were deep and round, and we decorated using crepe paper.

I am so much older now and much has changed. One thing, though, has not. I still draw stick figures. The females still wear skirts, colored skirts now.

The morning started later than usual. The dogs, especially Nala, no surprise there, got impatient and jumped on me to wake me up. I let them out then gave Gwen her insulin and me my coffee.

It is cold. I saw sun for a brief time earlier then it went behind the clouds, but it didn’t disappear. I can still see the light. Maybe it will be a nice day after all.

I haven’t any plans for today. Sunday is the day of rest. When I was growing up, it was Sunday dinner and visit the grandparent’s day. It was a formal day of sorts except in summer when Sundays were more relaxed. We sometimes spent the day at the beach. It was never a day to work.

When I was a kid, I had no interest in baking. I only liked the results. My mother made the best brownies. I loved that she always frosted them with chocolate frosting and chocolate jimmies. I’m a corner of the pan sort. I like the crispy sides of the brownies. My mother made chocolate chip cookies. She always followed the recipe on the back of the package. We used to snag cookies straight from the oven. They burned our hands and mouths, but we didn’t care. The cookies were warm and the chocolate still melty.

When I was in Ghana, I made sugar cookies for the first time ever. I had to ride a hundred miles each way to Tamale to fill the propane tank for my stove. I never used the stove or oven as there was no place in my town to fill the tank, but I needed the oven for my Christmas cookies, for what I hoped would be Christmas cookies in recognizable shapes. My mother, in the Christmas decoration package she had sent, included Christmas cookie cutters, stuff to make frosting and colored jimmies for decoration. I found a recipe in Ghana Chop, the Peace Corps Ghana cook book of the day, and bravely faced the ingredients. I even splurged on canned Australian butter, an expensive treat. I used a Star beer bottle to roll out the cookie dough. I had bought some flat metal in the market for a cookie sheet. It worked. The cookies were perfectly baked. They had a bit of brown on the bottom just as they should. I decorated every cookie. There were trees, stockings and Santas. They were masterpieces of a sort, being the the only decorated sugar cookies in all of Bolga, of that I am sure.

When I woke up, I thought it was yesterday. The sky is grey, and there are snow showers just the same as yesterday morning. It is still cold, 30˚, and the wind makes it feel even colder. I’m glad I have nowhere I need to be.

Nala woke me up. She was lying beside me whining. It was boxer speak for get up and let me out. I did. I am nothing if not obedient.

I have been lazy of late. Each morning I make a few tentative plans then I make the same plans the next morning. Today, though, I did bring my laundry to this floor from upstairs.

Both dogs are sleeping beside me on the couch, one on each side. Nala has her head on my lap. Henry is twitching. He is dreaming. Every now and then he stretches. Nala snores.

I used to wear slipper socks. My mother bought each of us a new pair every Christmas. The soles were leather, and we used to drive my mother crazy by shuffling our feet when we walked across the floor.

When I was a kid, we had yellow egg cups from Fannie Farmer. They were chickens and roosters and a single duck. Some school mornings my mother made us soft boiled eggs. She always sliced off the top of the eggs and put one egg in each egg cup. She also made toast and sliced it into four pieces, the perfect size to dip into the eggs. When I moved into my house, my mother brought down the egg cups. Some have missing beaks, but I don’t care. They are filled with memories.

We always called them dropped eggs on toast. When I was older, I found out they are officially poached eggs. My mother used to put the eggs in a pan with boiling water and swish them around. The cooked eggs were odd shapes, but they tasted the best. Later she got a special pan to cook the poached eggs. Each egg was perfectly round. They didn’t look like dropped eggs on toast anymore.

I used to like oatmeal, the old fashioned sort you had to cook on the stove. My mother made it in the winter so we’d be fortified for the walk to school in the cold. I usually sprinkled sugar on my oatmeal and added milk or my favorite, maple syrup. The oatmeal was always lumpy.

This morning I woke up to snow showers, but they lasted only a few minutes then the sun deigned to appear framed by blue. Now we have light grey clouds. It’s cold, only 26˚. My car’s trunk is frozen shut. How sad, no dump today, but I do have to get cat food.

When I was a kid, my favorite subject was English but not far behind English was geography. My favorite picture in my geography book was of the statue of Christ the Redeemer on Corcovado Mountain in Rio . His arms were spread straight out. Below the mountain was the ocean. I never forgot that picture. Many years later I saw the statue in real life. I stood below and looked up and was awed by the immensity of that statue and by those huge arms. It looked exactly like I remembered.

We never had strange food when I was a kid. The closest we got was tinned sardines. Mostly we ate meat and potatoes, mashed potatoes except on Sunday when we sometimes had baked. I don’t remember too many fresh vegetables except carrots which we didn’t like. My mother mixed them with the mashed potatoes, and we were none the wiser. For years I thought mashed potatoes were sometimes streaked with orange.

I don’t remember when I got brave enough to try unfamiliar foods. I know in Ghana I tried everything including Lebanese and Indian food. The first night we were in Ghana there was a welcome dinner. I didn’t recognize anything, but I tried every dish. I remember one dish which looked like mashed leaves. Later I learned it was kontomire stew. I never liked it. I tried the orange bananas. I thought they were just a Ghanaian variety you had to cook. Come to find out they were plantains which became one of my favorite foods, even to now.

My sister gave me a box of See’s lollipops, cinnamon lollipops, at Christmas. I devoured them and ordered more. I also devoured the new box. I then ordered two boxes. They came this morning. I haven’t yet opened the delivery carton. I know what will happen.

The rain is heavy. I can hear it on the roof. Later it will turn to a snow rain mix but stay mostly rain until tonight. It is above freezing at 39˚. Tonight will go down to the 20’s.

Today is a sloth day. My dance card is empty. I didn’t even make a to-do list.

Yesterday morning when I opened the back door for the dogs, I noticed white paper all over the yard below the steps. I was going to take a picture but decided I wanted my coffee and paper first. Big mistake. When I went out later, the wind had blown all the papers to the extreme back of the yard where they ended up against the fence. I decided to do a yard pick-up. That’s when I found out Christmas was on one side of the yard, the side I saw, and Easter was on the other, the surprise side. Nala had brought out two packages of napkins, one had dogs with Santa hats and the other rabbits dressed in their Easter finery. I cleaned up all of Easter, pieces from a couple of torn boxes and other random trash on thatside of the yard. I decided to clean Christmas later. I didn’t. Big mistake.

I ordered a special dinner today, Thursday’s Winter Warm-Up, from my favorite store, Ring Brothers. It will be delivered this afternoon. The stuffed pork caught my attention.

When I was a kid, we ate a lot of ground beef. My favorite was always my mother’s meatloaf. She’d put ketchup on the top then wrap it in bacon. Other times she’d frost it with mashed potatoes then bake it a bit more in the oven. I remember the swirl of the potatoes and the tips nicely browned. Her American chop suey was the stuff of legend. Her fanciest dinner was ground beef stroganoff over noodles. I always thought it a bit exotic with its foreign name. The easiest suppers were in the summer when my father would grill hamburgers and cheeseburgers. I’d put my cheeseburger in a toasted roll with a dollop of ketchup or maybe some mayo. I think I sighed with my first bite.

Today is sunny. Today is also, at times, cloudy. The high will only be 34˚. The wind is strong and cold and the topmost branches of the pine trees in the backyard are swaying. The dogs don’t stay out long. When they come back inside, their ears are cold.

Nala naps behind me on the couch. She jumps up, settles in and snuggles. She feels warm on my back.

I found one of my sandals on the driveway just inside the fence. I really thought I had well hidden the pair. It is now obvious that Nala’s talents are far greater than I ever imagined. Nothing is safe.

For breakfast this morning the dogs and I shared coffee and a banana. They love both. The two of them, one on each side of me on the couch, watched as I drank my coffee. Their heads followed my cup from the table to my mouth. I felt guilty. I gave them a taste.

I need to do a bit of shopping today. I am down to only one can of cat food. That will never do.

When I was a kid, I was seldom sick. I do remember getting the measles and staying in my darkened bedroom with no lights and covered windows, precautions so I wouldn’t go blind. I stayed in bed, in the dark room, until the spots disappeared. That’s when I learned the meaning of utter boredom.

I bought three small succulents a few weeks back. I put them, still in their little pots, in an otherwise empty pot until I could plant them. Now I don’t have to. Yesterday I noticed a pile of dirt on the living room rug. I knew the culprit. I just didn’t know the source of the dirt until I found a little pot, an empty little pot. I also found only a few torn pieces of greenery when Henry was chewing on them. He has gone to the dark side.

Last night the wind howled. Every tree in the backyard shook. The dogs wouldn’t go out into the wind. The donkey fell and the cow lost its head.

When I first woke up, the sky was cloudy. Now I see stretches of blue and the glint of sunlight. It is warm at 50˚. Tonight will be chilly again, in the high 30’s. The high wind warning is still in effect.

By January 18th we will have gained an hour of daylight since the solstice, and every 28 days we’ll gain another hour. We need to celebrate, to wear bright colors to welcome the sun. I’m thinking we need a party.

When I was a kid, the stretch between Christmas and February vacation seemed endless. The mornings were dark and cold. The streetlights came on early. January lasted a lifetime. Every day we bundled in layers and walked to school. We had to wait in the schoolyard, in the cold, until the bell, until the nun rang a handbell from just outside the door. We dutifully lined up two by two and walked into the building. School was inviting. I remember it felt warm after being outside for so long.

The school desks varied from room to room. I had one which opened at the top. It was easy to keep the inside neat and orderly. My lunchbox went under the desk or beside the chair. The worst desk was the one with the opening under the desk top. To find a book, you had to bend your head down and look through all the books for the right one. The nun would tell us to get our books, like our reading books, and every head bent down at the same time to look. It was almost synchronized.

I have one of those desks in my kitchen. The top holds the microwave and my collection of African cookbooks. In the book slot and on the chair are all the dish towels.

When I was on the deck earlier, I noticed my cup measure in the yard. It had disappeared along with an almost empty bag of dry dog food. The empty bag was in the back forty. While I was retrieving the cup measure, I found one of my metal windups. A wheel is missing. It is from a recent theft as I cleaned the yard Saturday. While I was in the yard, I picked up pieces of a cardboard box, also from a recent theft. That dog is tricky.

What a pretty day! The air is still, the sun is squint your eyes bright, and the sky is deep blue without a single cloud. It is 22˚ with a high wind warning. We are expecting wind gusts of 50-60 MPH and maybe even some coastal flooding. Rain will start late tonight.

I’ve started a new to do list. Not unexpectedly, the laundry tops the list. The basket is filled. I walk by it with eyes closed. I’m surprised I don’t trip on it.

Amazing news: Gwen started purring yesterday for the first time since she was diagnosed. I am thrilled. She is moving around more as well. Gwen is looking good.

When I was a kid, Sunday was my least favorite day of the week. We had to go to mass. It was only in the summer I didn’t mind going, didn’t even complain about it. I went to the early masses which were always crowded with people fulfilling their obligations so they could go to the beach or somewhere just as fun. The church usually ran out of room. People stood in the vestibule craning their necks to see the altar. The overflow stood on the top steps outside the church doors. My brother and I were, by choice, in the vestibule then we’d move to the top step and take a seat. We could hear the mass. We figured that was enough to let it count.

My eighth grade teacher was too old to deal with us. The classroom was generally quiet, but we all took advantage in different ways. I remember one kid would spill some milk in the waste basket then show it to Sister Hildegarde. She’d chastise the unknown culprit, actually standing in front of her but unbeknownst to her, and then send the culprit to clean it. He’d take the basket, leave and be gone a long while. Sister Hildegarde never noticed he was missing. My friend Jimmy and I often left early on the pretext we needed to go to the town library. Sister Hildegarde always gave us permission. We sometimes arrived back to class late after leaving for lunch, a lunch we brought and hid under our coats so we could leave. I remember once being an hour late. We told Sister Hildegarde we’d lost track of the time. She’d admonish us and tell us not to let it happen again. She always forgot. I remember she’d get exasperated at something or another or some student or another. She’d and tell us that when we graduated she was going to write on the board in tall letters, “Thank you, God, they are gone. “I always wondered if she really did.

The morning is uninviting so far. The sky is mostly cloudy though glimpses of sun and blue sky poke through for a bit of optimism on an ugly day. It is only 19˚, even worse with the wind chill. Last night was bitterly cold, and the wind was loud, turbulent. I fell asleep despite the howling. Nala fell asleep under the covers and Henry at the foot of the bed. My to do list has one item, clean the backyard. From the deck I can see all the trash Nala stole. That dog is an unrepentant recidivist.

When I was a kid, today would have been the perfect Saturday to sit in front of the TV and watch all my morning shows. I remember Fury and My Friend Flicka. All of my dogs have aspired to be Rin Tin Tin or Sergeant Prestons’ King. My favorite western has always been The Lone Ranger. Captain Midnight began my love for science fiction programs and movies. Creature Double Feature took up my afternoons. I sat as close to the TV as my mother allowed and watched two black and white science fiction movies. That’s where my love for them began. Even now I’d pop some corn and watch those old movies all day.

Tonight is hot dog, brown bread and baked beans night, at least it was my entire childhood. I’m going with just the hot dogs for my tonight’s supper as I’m not a lover of beans and never gave buying brown bread a thought. Back when I was a kid, I’d put sweet relish and yellow mustard on my dogs. Over the years my tastes have matured. I use a variety of mustards. My favorites vary. Right now I’m into spicy brown mustard. As for relish, it’s not for me. I choose piccalilli instead, a sort of chunky pepper and onion version. I also add chopped jalapeños and onions if I have any. Eating hot dogs has a couple of rules. The roll must always be toasted. It must, and I emphasize must, be open at the top. Choice of toppings is optional.

Languid is the word. Today is unhurried. The dogs and I have no intentions to move, to do anything needing energy. Both of them are napping. Nala is with me, and Henry is upstairs on my bed where I wish I were. The rain did it to us. When I heard the drops on the roof, I didn’t want to get out of bed. Outside is uninviting with dark clouds and rain. The day’s only saving grace is its warmth, 44˚. We have a high wind warning but no wind yet. Tonight’s high will be 29˚, but I don’t even care about the cold. I am staying close to hearth and home.

Yesterday was a banner day. I went to the dump. I had no choice. The trunk was filled with trash bags, most of them litter. The front and back seats had recycables. The back seat was totally covered by cardboard boxes filled with cardboard boxes. I was surprised by how quiet the dump was with few cars and no wind.

I also got a few groceries yesterday. Most were utilitarian, but I admit to apple and blueberry turnovers and a Three Musketeers. The dogs got biscuits. We were all happy.

When I was a kid, I loved being in school on a rainy day even though we had no recess. The classroom was in shadows despite the lights. The rain hit the windows. I remember they were the tallest windows stretching almost from ceiling to floor. A long stick with a curved metal piece at the top was the only way to open and shut them. The boys could use the stick, not the girls. Sometimes the pelting rain was loud and drowned out the nun, a miracle of its own, so we did quiet lessons like silent reading. I never understood that one even though it was graded. How did the nun know we were reading? The only thing I came up with was she watched our eyes moving across the pages, left to right. In my wanderings on line, I found sinistrodextral, which means reading left to right. The word has Latin roots, and with my four years of high school Latin, I can easily translate. Sinister means left and dexter means right. I suspect I’ll never have an opportunity to use this neat word. Not once in my life up to now has anyone ever asked me about reading left to right, but if someone does, I’m ready.