Keep the Coffee Comimg

The snow is beautiful. The topmost flakes are diamonds glinting in the sun. The sunlight reflecting off the snow is blindingly bright. The sky is a gorgeous blue. We got less snow than predicted, but the snow is so heavy everything is covered, and the lowers branches of the oak trees sag under the weight. Bushes are laden and are bending to the ground. I saw one plow much earlier on the street beside mine but not on mine which still has a layer of snow. Two of my neighbors are out and about, their driveways shoveled. I will wait for Skip, my factotum. I did cancel an early dentist appointment tomorrow in case I am low on Skip’s list.

One of my neighbors is here shoveling my walk and car so if I need to go out, I can. I am thrilled for this kindness.

We all survived the storm, that is all except my cable. The box has stopped working, but I was fine last night. I watch a Hallmark movie on my computer. In the middle of a raging blizzard, nothing is more comforting than a Hallmark movie. They always have happy endings.

I read in bed for a while last night. Nala joined me. Henry stayed downstairs until early this morning when he wanted into the bedroom. I let him in and he joined Nala and me on the bed, on my double bed.

Nala loves the snow. She eats it. I watched her burrow her muzzle into the snow and start chomping. She comes back inside with her muzzle, nose and the top of her head covered in snow.

Henry was upset last night and this morning. The holly tree, overladen with heavy snow, covered the deck stairs. Nala got through the branches and Henry went through one way, down. He wouldn’t up through the branches. He tried both sets of stairs, no luck. Henry is weird in this way. He’ll go out the dog door but hates to come in through the dog door though he is getting better. He went down through the holly but wouldn’t go up. I grabbed a broom and used the stick to take as much snow as I could off the holly branches. They lifted enough for a clear passage underneath. I swear I saw Henry smile as he walked up the stairs to the door.

The wind is tremendous. The snow is heavy and wet. The bushes near the house are bent to the ground. The branches from the oak tree by the deck have bent so much under the weight of the snow the smallest branches at the ends tap the backdoor and sound like fingers scratching the glass. Every niow and then the dogs and I raise our heads and look. The dogs were out chasing each other in the snow. Nala comes inside with her nose and head covered in snow. Both are wet and exhausted and are lying asleep on the couch, one beside me, the other behind me. Running in snow takes energy. 

The snow started last night around 11. I don’t know exactly how much snow we have, but I’m guessing around 4 or 5 inches with much more yet to come as many as 18 inches here on the cape. Everything is ladened with snow. The wind gusts have been as high as 60 MPH. The snow is drifting. 

The internet is down for the third time, but the electricity stays on so the house is warm and cozy. I might have had a Globe but the snow, falling so quickly, a couple of inches an hour, probably covered it. Still, I do love my paper so I decided to go check. It was ugly out. The wind was howling. My face got whipped by the snowflakes blown sideways by the wind so I gave up and ran back inside the house. I figured I’d read the paper online. Nope, I’m not on-line quite yet, but I am hopeful. 

I miss Shelby Scott. She was the reporter from Channel 4 sent out in the worst weather to do live updates. She was famous for her snow reports while being blown and buffeted by the wind and weather. Storms like this need Shelby. 

The cow and the donkey are safely in the house. Both beasts are in the living room. I triaged the cow’s hanging leg. Last night I lit my Christmas lights. The snow seemed to demand it. The colored lights looked beautiful. I will light again in a while. 

The electricity flickers and sometimes goes off for a minute or two. The internet doesn’t easily recover. It had gone down went down for the fifth time. When the electricity comes back on, there are beeps from Hey Google. Tree branches, heavy with snow, scratch against the windows. It scares Henry. He starts to shake. I hold him for a while and Nala sits beside him. A biscuit make him feel better but then it happens again, the same sequence of events: electricity off, electricity on, cable and internet gone, Hey Google back on with beeps, branches scratching the window, the back window this time, Henry shaking and getting as close to me as he can, even to my lap. I tried a treat again, and it helped for a little while, but he is staying close. He is still nervous. 

The electricity has been blinking on and of. The internet is far away. I will post this when I am no longer chiseling on stone. 

The Internet is back, but the cable is not. I turned off the light. Henry is better.

Today is cloudy and damp. It rained a bit during the night so paw prints on the kitchen floor are back. It is warmish at 42˚. I went out on the deck while my coffee was perking. Pieces of different sized white paper, torn white paper, are strewn about the yard, the part of the yard I’ve already cleaned. The backyard is beginning to look like a vacant lot. I don’t know what the pieces used to be. I’ll find out when I clean the yard. (I just found out when Nala, of course, tried to steal more. She brought out and ate all the cat treats. I had not closed the gate well enough, my fault).

This morning has been almost perfect. I slept late. Everything is quiet, not a person or a car anywhere on the street. The coffee was delicious, both cups of it. Nala is now asleep, resting from her morning antics.

I took my time with the paper. It was filled with all sorts of news I just had to read. I noticed the overthrow of the president of Burkina Faso by the army. I used to go to Ougadougou, the capital, for the weekend. Back then the country was called Upper Volta. I loved Ougadougou. First, it had a great name. It also had a great market, below the street in the center of the city. I bought some unique metal pieces in that market. We always stayed at a nice hotel. With three of us splitting the cost of one room, we could. Breakfast was Yukka soda and small baguettes. We always ate dinner in a nice restaurant. A couple of times, it was the one in the center run by nuns. Ouga always felt small in a comfortable way.

I have no plans for today. Groceries are being delivered shortly. I can’t remember the last time I was in a supermarket. (Ring doesn’t count as a supermarket because it is many stores.) Mostly I ordered essentials, like cheese, and some odd things like chopped dates and chocolate croissants. I’m good for a while on supermarket stuff.

I think the most amazing experiences in Ghana are on market day, every third day in Bolga. When I lived there, I loved market day. It was a carnival without the rides. All the stalls were filled with sellers. The paths through the different offerings sometimes had so many people you had to walk sideways through the crowds. I bought my fruit and vegetables first. There were lots of fruits but few vegetables. I went to my favorite onion and tomato lady. She always dashed me some of each. Next came the eggs. I went to the same egg man all the time. He never gave me a bad egg. The beef came from the meat market which was disgusting, but only in the beginning. After a while I didn’t even notice. The meat came wrapped in leaves. The chickens were tied by one leg to a thick rope or string on the ground. There were rows of chickens. I’d look for the fattest and buy it. The chicken man tied the chicken’s legs together and handed the chicken to me to carry by those legs. It felt odd at first to be carrying a chicken. After a while, it felt day-to-day.

Any lifetime when carrying a live chicken by its legs is just part of the day is a life filled with the unexpected becoming the usual. It is living in Africa, in Ghana. My day-to-day didn’t even seem different after a while and neither did the chicken. I just slung it over the handlebar of my moto and drove home where it was destined to be dinner.

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.