The morning is cloudy. Google says it’s sunny, but he has no access to the windows. The air is a bit damp and makes today’s 74˚ feel cooler than it is. The small breeze is constant. Rain is predicted for tomorrow. Of course it is. I washed the kitchen floor yesterday. Maybe if I had known about this connection before, the one between rain and a clean kitchen floor, I could have prevented the drought we find ourselves in, and my kitchen floor would be immaculate. My only plan for today is a trip to the dump as it will be closed the next three days. Such an adventure!

I’m wearing my slippers, both of them. The former lost slipper feels a bit different, a little squishy in the toe. I don’t mind. I’m just happy to have my slipper back. I still need to collect the rest of Nala’s trash from the yard.

When I was a kid, Sunday was sacrosanct. The stores were closed. The churches were full. My church had masses up and down. I liked the down as the mass seemed to go faster, freeing us sooner. Back then women had to wear hats. I used to wear a small, round mantilla, the smallest not really a hat I could find. I used to crumble it up and put it into my pocket when I was out of church. Lace doesn’t crumble. It pockets well.

My grandmother lived down the street from the First National. She used to grab her wheeled basket, the sort you pull behind you, and shop. She had a closet in the kitchen where she stored some groceries, but I remember most the bottles of root beer on the closet floor. The kitchen’s top cabinets went to the ceiling. My grandmother was tall but stooped the way some some old ladies are. The only table in the kitchen was a built in with a bench. It was cozy, a better word than small. My grandmother wasn’t a good cook. She could do a roast with potatoes and canned veggies as that was an easy meal to fix, but her spaghetti was gross with stewed tomatoes plunked on top instead of sauce. I hated the clumps of tomatoes. When I was really young, we used to go there for dinner on Thanksgiving day evening. I can still see the wooden dining room table with matching chairs and the French doors facing the side yard. I don’t think I ever saw those doors opened. We used to use the side door which opened to the kitchen. All of the doors except the front were close to neighbors’ houses. My grandparents’ yard was open to all the backyards. Much, much later, a different owner fenced in the yard. It was a tiny yard. Once in a while I go by the house on my way to somewhere else.

Huzzah!! I have a pair of slippers. The lost slipper appeared as if by magic. I went on the deck and saw my slipper on the driveway part in the yard. I ran down the deck steps closely followed by Nala, trying, I suspect, to save her treasure. The slipper is a bit worse for wear. It is soaked from all the rain. A new hole is on the side. It also lost its insides which appeared, almost magically again, in the house in two pieces, one at a time. Now I have a pair of slippers.

When I was a kid, I got new slippers every Christmas. Each year they were the same, slipper socks with a wool top and a leather bottom. Only the color of the wool changed. The soles made a noise when I walked, a sort of a shuffling sound. They kept my feet quite warm. One year my sister gave me a pair of slipper socks for Christmas. The top was mauve. They made noise when I walked.

When I visit the town where I grew up, I sometimes just drive around some of the streets looking for my memories. They are easy to find. My house hasn’t changed. The trees have. They are taller than the house. My elementary school hasn’t changed either, but the convent where the nuns lived was torn down, the land sold and a building sits there now. I pass houses where kids I used to know lived. I think about them.

I have been to the theater uptown to see plays. It was my movie theater when I was a kid. The front hasn’t changed, but the inside is totally different. People can sit in the balcony, and none of them toss Juju Beads at the people below which usually includes me. The folks in the back row now watch the play. During Saturday matinees couples sat there and made out as we used to say. I found it amazing. I was probably only 10.

I miss places in my town which have disappeared. The armory where I used to have drill team practice is now a hardware store. The armory was sort of neat with all wood and the hanging flags and banners. The hardware store is generic. The fish market spot has a restaurant, the second one on the site. I’ve eaten there once. I had a Cuban sandwich. The diner is gone, replaced I think by another hardware store. The box factory is gone. It was across from the train station and the red store. I used to cross by it when I walked the tracks. The police box which sat in the middle of the square was hit by a car and couldn’t be saved. It is one of the unique places in my old town I miss the most.

I have friends who still live in town. I don’t see them often. One has been my friend for well over 60 years. We share amazing memories. We laugh a lot. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Today is a perfectly lovely day. The sun is bright, the air is clear and it’s only 69˚. The forecasted high for today is 71˚. The forecasted low is 59˚, yup, fifty nine degrees. I have to go out because I can’t waste this weather which will stay the same the whole long weekend. Blissful is my mood of the moment.

I am the victim of a plague, not one of the Biblical plagues of note but my own plague, a fly plague. Yesterday I had to go out for the first time since Friday. When I opened the car door, flies attacked me. Well, not so much attacked me but more like ran into me as I was just standing in the way of their freedom. I didn’t go into the car. There were too many of them. I did manage to get all the windows opened. The flies were small, maybe baby flies. my first baby flies. I waited outside the car and watched the swarm leave. The sky darkened, and the only sound was the fluttering of wings. Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I’m telling you it took a while before all of the flies left for sunnier climes. Flies are dumb bugs. A lot of them crawled under the opened window so I had to shoo them out. I figured they just had to come from the trunk, from where the trash bags were. Today I will open the trunk and duck.

Nala continues her felonious ways, and I don’t know where she is finding the paper to shred. The only place I can think of is the recycle bin of papers and magazines. Nala has also become a naturalist. Yesterday she brought in a small branch filled with dead leaves. They ended up on the floor by the door and Nala, with some help from Henry, the abetter, chewed away the branch. When I was on the deck earlier, I saw a dog food can in the yard. I didn’t see any legs. It didn’t walk there.

When I walk to the kitchen, tumbleweeds fly in front of me. They rise slightly in the air then fall back down to the floor. They are never completely eliminated. I’d need bald dogs before that happened.

My slipper is still missing. This morning I went to get my papers. I was barefooted. I ended up having to step on pathway stones to get the papers. They hurt. I should have worn shoes. I really miss my slipper.

When we woke up this morning or rather closer to this afternoon, it was cloudy and cold, 64˚ cold, and the day won’t get any better. It will stay cloudy and dark and cold with a low of 60˚and a high of 69˚. A strong wind is swaying the pine tree branches. A flood watch is in effect. It is an ugly day.

Yesterday was an odd, as in unusual, sort of day. It started in the morning when a vase fell over after the flowers shifted. The water from the vase fell all over the kitchen floor under and over cans and bottles of food. I started picking up the wet stuff including a bag of dog food which had been folded over the top to keep Nala from snacking. I failed fold. The dog food fell out of the bag all over the wet floor. Nala thought she was in heaven when she saw the food. I thought I was in hell. The cleanup took a while.

Rain started slowly yesterday in the early evening. I could hear the drops on the leaves from the open window behind me. Not long after, the deluge began. The thunder came first. It was so loud Nala raised her head each time. Henry slept through. A couple of lightning bolts were next. They lit up my den window. The rain kept falling. At one point there was a lull, and I thought the storm was over despite the weather predictions. I was wrong. The most rain fell after ten. There were tornado warnings for Barnstable county. I watched the tracks of those tornados on TV. The first warning was until 12:45 then it was changed to 1:45. The rain was still falling as heavily as it had been. Around three there was a lull in the rain. I let both dogs out for the last time before we went to bed. The amount of rain which soaked us was around 3 or 4 inches but not enough to get us out of drought conditions.

My laundry has made it to this floor. The two bags are stacked in the hall. One bag was so heavy it fell down the stairs and sent Nala scurrying. I need to do a few household chores including changing my bed. Despite the damp, I did run over the kitchen floor with a wet mop. I know they’ll be tons of new paw prints today, but I couldn’t take the dirty floor anymore. I’d have to close my eyes every time I went into the kitchen.

I do need to go out today. I wish I didn’t. Nothing about today makes me want to be out and about. I’ll need a sweatshirt.

Today is cloudy, hot and humid. It will be in the mid 80’s but will drop to the 60’s tonight. The rain, a remnant from Ida, will be here on Thursday. The winds could gust up to 40 mph, and the storm could drop 3 inches or 4 inches of rain. That’s another reason (think excuse) not to wash the kitchen floor: more dog paw prints from the upcoming rain. I’m glad I grocery shopped yesterday.

Today I have a malaise. My stomach is bitterly complaining about something. It can’t be dinner as I actually had a salad. Last night was an unquiet sleep, a portend of this morning. I’m wearing track shoes (symbolism here) so I can sprint to the bathroom. The dogs watch me from the hall. That too is unsettling.

On the shoe/slipper front, I didn’t find it, but I haven’t yet checked through the brush in the backyard. I’m really missing my slipper.

I did go to the dump yesterday as I didn’t want the trash to sit in my car until Thursday, the next time the dump is open. A nice man helped me lug the heavy litter bags from the car to the big receptacle.

Nala chewed on my back scratcher. The five teeth have become three with spaces between them where there were no spaces. The scratcher was in one of the baskets under the den table top. Nala finds the three baskets under the table a rich hunting ground.

When I was a kid, Duke, our boxer, chewed a few things during his puppy days. Those few things included the upholstery over the windows of my father’s car and a roast beef though my brother and I managed to save it, and nobody noticed the teeth marks. Nala has no preference and no standards for stolen goods. Paper, cans, newspapers and so many more strange items are among the missing. I know she’s taken something when she rushes out the dog door and ignores my call.

My plans for today are simple: sit around, watch a little TV, read a bit and nap.

The morning started out sunny. The clouds took over for a bit then the sun returned but disappeared quickly. I think that will be the pattern though cloudy is the forecast. It is warm and humid. It is 83˚, but a wind is keeping it from being oppressive.

My slipper, the one with the hole, has disappeared. It was on the floor by my bed last night. I doubt it left voluntarily. I checked under the bed and in the yard. I didn’t find it. Later I’ll do a more comprehensive hunt.

Lately I have been a bit bored. Nothing holds my interest too long. I jump from activity to activity. The laundry pile is getting tall enough for mountain status. The kitchen floor is filled with paw prints. The dust in this room is thick, Miss Havisham type dust. The plants cry out for water when I walk by them. My sheets are ready to walk themselves to the cellar. I need to get motivated.

My dump run is slated for today as it is closed Tuesday and Wednesday. The only trash bags waiting to be hauled to the car are filled with used cat litter, heavy used cat litter. I need a Sherpa.

When I was growing up, we lived in a project. We even called it the project. Each house was a duplex, one side the mirror image of the other. We never thought of project as a pejorative word. It was just our house. The five rooms were sort of small. In the kitchen we all couldn’t sit at the table, squeezed against the wall, at the same time, just the four of us kids ate together. That was okay as my mother aways ate at the counter, and my father got home late. The living room was where we spent most of the time. The TV was there, in the corner of the room, mostly across from the couch. The living room had a picture window. Upstairs were the three bedrooms and the bath. My room overlooked the back and side yards. The double bed I shared with my sister took up a good deal of space. The rest was taken up with a desk and a bureau. I never used my desk much. My mother and father brought it down to me here. It is in the cellar piled with boxes. I haven’t any space. We had a huge cellar where my mother did her washing and where we sometimes played when it rained. The Christmas boxes and some toys and games were also stored in the cellar. The house I live in by myself is bigger than the house where the six of us lived for a long while, before we moved here to the cape.

Everything is quiet. I can hear only the rustling of leaves from the backyard when the tree branches twist in the wind. The dogs are having their morning naps. Even pesky Nala is quiet and probably dreaming about chewing slippers.

The sky is cloudy, and the air is perfectly still. The morning is a bit noisy. From the street behind mine, I can hear a lawnmower. The operator of said lawnmower does not realize he is breaking Sunday protocol. Lawns are mowed on Saturday. It is a long tradition.

It is only 72˚ right now, and the temperature won’t get much higher, maybe a degree or two. The high humidity makes the air feel a bit chilly. The clouds are staying around all day.

I haven’t yet decided what to do today. I have been loading trash into the car but am saving the dump for tomorrow. I need something to look forward to, and I still need to change the cat litter.

Alexa and I had another useless conversation this morning. She told me it was time to reorder cat litter, the blue crystals I tried a while back. Did I want it on my shopping list? No, I said. No, what, Alexa asked. I said do not add the blue crystals to my shopping list. She said I had no shopping list. Did I want to start a shopping list? I told her to shut up. She did.

When I was a kid, just about every kid I knew had a bike and a sled. Bikes were mostly regular size. Little two wheelers with training wheels weren’t around. It didn’t make much sense to go from a tricycle to a bike with four wheels. I learned to ride on the street in front of my house. My mother taught me. I don’t remember falling, but I suspect I might have. I didn’t have elbow pads or a helmet. Scrapes were part of the learning curve. I always thought a little blood was an incentive to learn to ride quickly.

Nala and I play catch down the hall She starts by bringing me her round, fluffy pink ball with a face and ears. I throw it. She runs then returns it. The game doesn’t usually last too long. Nala gets distracted easily. Usually Henry is the reason.

Speaking of Henry, he came in the dog door today. It fit his purpose to run to the front door and bark at the woman walking her dog. He went out again, and in a bit, he banged the door for me to let him in. I did. Without an emergency, Henry will stay outside that door waiting. I did try to wait him out the other day. It didn’t work. I felt guilty after a half hour.

Today is a delight. The humidity is gone, waiting in the wings until Monday, and it is only 74˚, the high for the day. I haven’t any need to go out, but I will just to savor the day.

I woke up early because of the lawn mower. The grass was getting cut, and the deck was being blown clean just outside my bedroom window. The dogs wanted out so I went downstairs, let them out and waited for Henry to come back to the door. I let him in and went back to bed. Nala joined me. I slept two more hours. Henry went out while I was sleeping. He was still outside waiting at the door for me when I went downstairs. The poor boy!

The flowers, the clematis, covering the fence in the front yard have begun to bloom. This morning I stood to admire the white blossoms when I heard a buzzing sound. Strangely enough an Emily Dickinson poem jumped into my head. I heard a Fly buzz is the title of the poem, a title drawn from the first line of her poem as Emily didn’t title anything. Okay, back on topic, sorry for the tangent, enough with the random trivia. Anyway, the buzzing was from bees, not flies. The flowers draw bees. When all of the flowers have bloomed and covered the fence, I avoid the fence and gate because bees are everywhere though a couple of times I did risk my life and go through gate as sort of a self dare. The bees buzzed louder and a few took to flight. I ran to the house, got inside and exhaled deeply, happy I was safe.

When I was a kid, I would have roamed all day on a day like today. I’d have wrestled my bike from the cellar, made a lunch and been gone. My route changed from Saturday to Saturday, and I’d hit all my favorite spots. At the golf course, I’d hunt for errant balls, the victims of slices and hooks. I usually found one or two. I liked to stop at the train station in the next town over. I’d often sit on a bench, eat my lunch and hope to see a train. Sometimes I did. After lunch, I’d choose the rest of my route and explore.

I usually lasted until late afternoon before I headed home.

Today is pretty but already hot. It is 86˚ and humid. I’m not going anywhere. I doubt I’ll even get dressed. Today is a good day to stay in the cool house and maybe read or watch a movie. I have cheese, and I have crackers. I have ice cream. I’m content.

Both dogs came back inside panting heavily. It took a while for Nala to settle down for her morning nap. Henry is barking. It could be because a car went by, a walker walked by, my neighbor checked his yard or someone slammed a car door. Henry is the dog that cries wolf.

Both dogs have well dog visits together later in September. Henry needs a variety of shots. Nala needs to be seen. I have all her vet records to give them. I hope having Nala in the car with him will help Henry enjoy the ride more.

I have jumped into the plot of Charlotte’s Web. I know where all the baby spiders are, my house. They are threading their webs from plant to plant on the windowsills and on chairs leg to leg. The webs are small as are the spiders. They haven’t woven me a message yet, but I keep looking.

I have become a vampire. The nurse called from the doctor’s office to give me the results of my pre-physical blood tests, but I already knew. She said my vitamin D is in the dumps, a medical term I hadn’t heard used before in quite the same way. I am now taking a heavy regimen of vitamin D. I suppose I could sit in the sun for a while, but it is just too hot.

When I was a kid, I had two pairs of shoes, school shoes and play shoes. The school shoes doubled as church shoes. I never wore my school shoes outside when I played. I had ingrained in me that school shoes and playtime should never meet. I always changed out of school clothes as soon as I got home.

I have winter shoes and summer shoes, a pair of each. I have many more shoes than that, but I don’t wear them much. Mostly I still wear my wool clogs thus mixing summer and winter, but their future is bleak. My big toe has pushed through. Where’s the duct tape?

Today is hot. The temperature is 89˚, but the humidity makes it feel ever hotter, closer to 97˚. Earlier, I had to bring a box to the trunk anticipating a dump run later. The box was so heavy I had to turn it end to end to get it to the car. I have yet to develop a strategy to lift it into the car.

Having run out of excuses to delay the inevitable, I am going to wash the kitchen floor today. I have one appointment after which I’m free to don my house dress, grab the bucket and mop and wash and clean. I’ll sing a happy tune. No I won’t. There’s nothing happy about it, and I have no bluebirds.

Yesterday I cleaned the yard. Nala had stolen the newspapers while they were still in the plastic sleeve so I went to retrieve them. The Globe was spread out page after page. The Cape Times was intact but had teeth marks. Happily, I was able to reassemble the Globe to read it. This morning I watched her steal crumbled brown packing paper from the recycle bag. I let her have it. Chasing her would have been a lost cause. I’ll clean it up later.

When I was a kid, I loved this time of year. It was still warm, even hot, in the mornings for my walk to school. I remember Pomeworth Street, the long street I walked from top to bottom on my way to school. It had wonderfully big, old houses close to the sidewalks. Some had porches. All had yards. I walked over the tracks and by the train manager’s house. I loved those tracks. I had walked them many times but one thing bothered me. I didn’t know where the other end went. We never walked that far. I still don’t know.

I usually walked down the first sort of driveway into the school yard then into the school and my classroom where I was stuck for most of the day. At the end of school, after I’d changed out of my school clothes, I’d play outside until the street lights came on. I argued for more time using simple logic. The lights came on early because the day was shorter. I didn’t explain it as succinctly to my mother but the gist was there. My mother said no.

In September and October, my father and all the other men in the neighborhood were out every weekend, rakes in hand. I still remember the sounds of those rakes gathering and piling the leaves. I can still see my father in my mind’s eye standing by the pile holding his rake. I remember the flames from the burning piles, but I most remember the smell, the aroma, of leaves burning. Those Saturdays of the fathers raking leaves and then supervising the controlled burn were some of my favorite reasons for loving this time of year.

I’m going to end here leaving you in suspense. I said,”…some of my favorite reasons…” Are there more? Is this a serial? I’m shrugging my shoulders in response.