The weather has been close to perfection. The last few days have been in the low 80’s while the nights have been in the 60’s, perfect sleeping weather. Today we have a breeze.

Yesterday I planted the rest of the deck flowers. I cleaned the furniture. Today I’ll water those plants, and when it gets cooler, I’ll sit outside under the umbrella, book in one hand, lemonade in the other. It is sloth time.

Today I could sweep the house, but I won’t. I’ll just let the tumbleweeds whirl in the air as I walk. I do have an errand, but I’ll wait until the air is cooler.

Yesterday, wonders appeared as if by magic. Close to sunset the sky was pink all across the west, and the pink spread everywhere, the house next door, in between the trees in the backyard and through my windows. The color drew me to the deck where I stayed until the sun set and the day began to darken, but the wonder continued. I saw the first fireflies in my backyard flitting around the pine trees and the tall grass. I stayed and watched and smiled the whole time I was outside.

In the paper today, a small article mentioned the Milky Way will appear all this month. Billions of stars in a band of light will arc across the sky. I was reminded of Ghana. I had never so many stars as those in the Ghanaian night sky. I could see the Milky Way, the dusty trail of stars, every night. The starlight made for shadows. There were falling stars, and I made a wish on each one. I slept outside on a mattress and fell asleep to the beauty of the night.

Some time last night or early this morning it rained. The ground was wet, and there were some drops on the back door or I wouldn’t have known. Yesterday I planted the deck flowers so I’m glad for the rain, but Mother Nature is taunting us. She is exacting a high price for rain. The air is so humid you can see and feel it. It is almost stifling. The breeze just stirs the air. Light rain is predicted, but I am a skeptic.

Sometimes I think about classmates from grammar school. We were together for eight years. I know some have gone to their heavenly rewards (euphemism for departed, passed, died, unalive, the silliest one I think, gone to a better place, my least favorite, expired, better fitted for cans and such, late, reminds me of the White Rabbit, and the worst of them, kicked the bucket). I wonder where Elaine Clapper is. What about Eleanor Garland? It was Marty Barrett who prompted my promise to myself to travel. Michelle Wells is another. There was a Dwayne somebody. I know there are so many I don’t remember. My graduation picture hangs on the bathroom wall over the sink. That sounds strange I know, but that bathroom has a school theme, probably also strange.

I love summer nights. When I was a kid, I could hear the neighbors through the screens. I could hear mumbled conversations and loud TV’s. I could hear the chirping crickets and the katydids. The man in the moon had two expressions. He was either smiling or his mouth was open in surprise. I always wondered what was on the dark side. Stars filled the sky and lightened the night. I always wished on a falling star.

I still love the nights. I’m up most nights until the wee hours. When the dogs go out before bed, I often stand on the deck and watch them. It is quiet. The house behind mine always has one light on. A house further down also has a light in one room. My house is well lit, even the outside light. I always think I own the night.

The morning is just about perfect. The clouds are sharing. The sun is bright. Everything is quiet. My house still holds the coolness from last night. The high today will be 80°. We’re just about there already.

Today I will finish my deck preparation. I need to clean off the furniture and hang up the decorations. I have one chair and a small table in the cellar which will go on the deck. I need to open the umbrellas. I’m thinking dinner on the deck.

I take time now. I can do or not do whatever I want. I can sit outside and listen to the birds and do nothing else or I can clean the house, one room at a time. I have learned to slow down, to ignore dust so thick I could write a novel on its surface. Even my vacuum sometimes gets dusty.

When I was a kid, my world was filled with wonder. Fireflies lit up the field below my house. I could hear the grasshoppers. I’d run through the tall, brown grass and watch them jump high in front of me. Wild blueberries ripened untended on the bushes. Uptown was filled with the aroma of bread baking. It sweetened the air. In front of the fish market, I could smell the wares, fish on ice and lobsters in the window. I watch spiders weave their webs. I found spiders’ webs marvels. I loved the smell of wood burning. Fresh cooked corn lathered with butter and a bit of salt was perfection. Every day seemed to bring a bit of wonder.

As I grew older, I lost touch with wonder. My life revolved around friends and school and weekends. I didn’t notice what was around me.

Living in Ghana brought back the wonder. It was a whole new world filled with so many new sights and sounds and smells and tastes that every day was jaw dropping, filled with the joy of living in such a remarkable place. I loved the rooster greeting the morning. I loved walking around town and shopping in the market. Nothing was ever commonplace, even taking a shower in the cold water at night.

Since my retirement, I have again found the wonder, the enchantment, of every day. I love the morning songs of birds and fog over the river before the sun is high. I check on my flowers every day. I have no set routine. I never mind staying home. I can play the ukulele. I had the time to learn. I love waking up every morning and looking forward to the day.

Mother Nature toys with us. The sky is cloudy for a while, filled with white clouds which carry no rain, then the sun appears. I hold off my cheers. I know better. Sure enough, the clouds return while the sun waits in the wings, but she will soon take another turn and reappear. Right now it is 79°.

I have a few chores today. The dog fur tumbleweeds are back or maybe they never left. They are everywhere downstairs. I could make a black and white science fiction movie with the tumbleweeds having teeth and chasing me down the hall to attack. I can imagine them chomping at my heels.

This morning I grocery shopped. It will be delivered this afternoon. I did forget a few things, but they are extras not usually on my list. Plantains and strawberries came to mind later.

When I was a kid, I loved watermelon on a hot day. My father would cut it into slices. When I was really young, the juice often ran down my arms. It made red lines. My sister wondered why we don’t have watermelon everywhere. We all spit out the seeds. Sometimes it was a contest to see who could spit the furthest. I never won. It was the same with cherry pits. I also never won those contests either.

When I was a teacher, I used to travel every summer. Mostly I went to Europe. I’d be gone five or six weeks. I always ended my trips with a few days in London. I’d stay mostly in hostels. I traveled on the cheap. I carried a Let’s Go Europe book with all the ways to save money like having a drink at a bar with free food. I’d buy bread and tomatoes and cold cuts to make sandwiches. I bought mustard paste and kept it in my backpack. I stayed at the former Olympic dorms in Helsinki. In other places I stayed in university housing as students were gone for the holidays. I never stayed in a hotel. I took trains and busses at night and slept and saved a little money. Usually I even came home with a little money left over.

Now, of course, when I travel, I don’t backpack, and I stay in hotels. I eat in restaurants. I rent a car. I live the good life.

Today is an unpleasant day, cloudy with rain expected and chilly at 65°. The roads will be filled with tourists hoping to find diversions. Route 28 will be the most heavily trafficked with slow cars and their gawkers. The parking lots at movie theaters will be filled beyond capacity so cars will haphazardly park on the grass. Such is Cape Cod on a chilly, cloudy summer day.

I sometimes wonder about food, strange foods, at least to me. Did every explorer have a food taster? I remember once when my brother ate some red berries and had to have his stomach pumped. I wonder about the artichoke. Who tried first and how many attempts before it was edible as not only is it ugly but also cooking and eating it is complicated. It seems most cultures have traditional foods we might not eat. In Ghana, chicken feet were boiled then eaten. They became gelatinous, and I thought they were gross to look at let alone eat. Insects are eaten all over the world. I have never been tempted to eat a spider, a grub or even locusts. As a joke one year I bought lollipops from Mexico with worms inside. Nobody tried them. They got tossed. I did try frog legs, and they weren’t bad. They were actually tasty. My mother could never watch my dad, my sister and me eat steamed clams. They grossed her out.

I have found that asking questions is sometimes the wrong approach in identifying unknown foods. It was in Ghana where I learned that and where my culinary experiences began. The one food I should never have questioned there was bush meat. I should have just been content to wrap pieces in bread and eat them. I found out it was grasscutter, a bush rat, a rodent. Had I not already eaten it, I would have been grossed by it being a rodent of sorts; instead, I kept eating it anyway.

When I first visited my sister in Colorado, I ate Rocky Mountain oysters which are not oysters. They are bull testicles battered in flour and deep fried. Even now, decades later, my stomach turns a bit at the thought of them.

Today is the second delightful day in a row. Last night was even chilly, yup chilly. I had to shut the window and put on socks. I even snuggled under the blanket on my bed and easily fell asleep. This morning is in the 60’s. Today’s high will be 70°. It’s a beautiful morning, sunny with only a few clouds to break the monotony. A few leaves are blowing.

When I was a kid, jumping over the sprinkler was one way to cool down. The metal sprinkler had arms and turned in a circle. We’d adjust the height of the water for the perfect jump until the water was not too high or not too low, sort of Goldilock’s moments but without the bears. The sprinkler was always on the grass by the side of the house. We’d spread towels in the sun as if we were on the beach. The water was always cold at first. When the grass got really wet, we’d sometimes slide and leave trails in the wet grass. My father was never pleased. He was a grass man.

I remember my father switching from storm windows to screens. He had to borrow a ladder so he could get to the second floor windows. That was always scary for us to watch as my father and ladders had a lamentable history. The storm windows hooked at the top. He had to pull the windows up off the hooks with both hands while he leaned into the ladder so he wouldn’t fall. After he got the windows off the hooks, he’d carry each one down the ladder with one hand holding the window and the other hand holding the side of the ladder. I still, to this day, wonder how he managed all those windows every year without falling. I swear the guy who invented the combo storm and screen windows knew my father.

This has been a busy week for me, but I missed the concert Wednesday as the string of my uke broke when I was tuning. I left to have it strung. The stringer wasn’t there so I had to go to the master of all, YouTube, to learn how to string it. I succeeded. I can now add stringing a uke to my resume.

The cape will be setting a heat record today. The prediction is a high of 95° and a low of 76°, as if anyone around here would call 76° a low. It was already 86° when I woke up this morning. My AC is blasting.

Cats throw up, mostly hairballs. I give Jack stuff to prevent them, but it doesn’t always work. Jack hates me. Before I go to bed, I fill his water, his wet food and treat bowls then sit with him brushing and patting him for a long while, but Jack is a thankless beast. When he throws up, it is on exactly the path I use to walk into his room, his dark room, not yet lit by the lamp on the table. I’m usually barefoot. Last night I stepped in it. My feet and the bottom of my pants got wet. I yelled. I swore. Jack didn’t care. He watched with what I believed was a sly grin on his face, a sort of Cheshire Cat imitation.

When I was a kid, we always had pets. Over time we had a turtle, a parakeet, dogs and cats. The dog was the first, Duke, our boxer. He made me a lover of boxers, those gentle, crazy, sweet, protective and loving dogs. When I got my first dog, naturally, it was a boxer, and I’ve had one ever since, Henry being the only male dog and the only other sort of dog I’ve had. Nala is unique. Her skill is thievery, quick and silent escapes from the house with booty in mouth. Nala is a naturalist. She brings leaves, pine cones, pine needles and sticks of all sizes into the house. I never catch doing either making the superiority of my species in question.

I’m in the mood for an adventure. I haven’t had one in a while. It could be as simple as a ride on unfamiliar roads. I’m not picky. When I was a kid, I had adventures all the time. I’d ride to the next town over to sit and watch the trains. I loved the feel of the breeze from the speedy train whooshing by me. I’d ride by the ponds in the two next towns over. Sometimes I stopped. Sometimes I just kept riding. I’d walk to the swamp then check on bushes at the edge of the grassy hill for blueberries. I’d cross the street to see the horses in the field. I’d take the long way home. That was an adventure in itself.

The week will be hot, in the 80’s to start the week then the 70’s at the end of the week. The nights will be in the 60’s, a lovely relief. I’m think air conditioning.

I keep dropping things, hitting things with my head and knees, tripping over small things and big things. Tripping doesn’t discriminate. My dogs place themselves exactly where I need to go. I walk so cautiously you’d think there were land mines.

Last night, a memory popped into my head prompted by a scene in a movie, a scene of Greek dancers in traditional clothing. All of a sudden I remembered a night in Portugal. My parents and I heard music coming from the top floor of a small hotel where we were staying for the night. Curiosity took over and we went upstairs. We stood outside the door watching dancers celebrating in movement. It was a wedding reception. A few people noticed us and invited us to join them. We did, and we danced and ate and chattered with the people we had never seen before and would never see again, but we felt a companionship that night. We belonged.

When I was a kid, I never gave much thought to life, far too philosophical for a ten year old. Thinking about lunch was about as far into life as I got. That sounds simple but was far more complex than you’d imagine. What’s in the fridge? What if nothing is in the fridge? Is there marshmallow? That disappeared quickly. Peanut butter seldom did. Are there cookies? What if there are no cookies? That question was as close to philosophical as I ever got. Cookies were important in my world.

I always had wishes and dreams. Some wishes were as simple as my Christmas lists. I methodically added the item numbers from the Sears catalogue so they’d be no confusion. I wanted the elves to get it right. You all know I was in the sixth grade when I promised myself I’d travel the world. It was a personal promise I didn’t share. That promise has stayed with me the whole of my life. It is my only enduring promise.