The morning is dreary, but the sort of dreariness chased away by a few lit lamps. I always feel a sense of comfort from the lights.

Today I have no to do list. I have done the last few days. I have a back ache and a groaning body from the lifting and moving. Today being Sunday is a day of rest actually and metaphorically.

My dance card this week is uke heavy. Besides the usual practice and lesson I have three concerts. They begin the summer of concerts.

Yesterday I switched from winter to summer. I replaced the door storms with screens. It was a project. The storms were so heavy I couldn’t easily lift them so I catty-corner moved them side to side. I held my breath for so long going down the cellar stairs with them I skirted passing out. I couldn’t reach the top of the storms to loosen the screws so I grabbed my step ladder, also heavy, also needing to be moved side to side. The screens went in easily. Last night I could feel the breeze from the back door.

My lack of strength was evident when I moved the glass to the cellar yesterday. I used to be able to carry 50 pounds of cat litter into the house and up the stairs. Now, I strain. Now I am old. People usually contradict me when I say that, and I look at them quizzingly. I will be 78 in August. The bloom has long been off the rose.

When I was a kid, we lived in a duplex in the project. It was always called the project. For us it was just a neighborhood. I remember when my friend from New Jersey came with me to my hometown. I gave her a tour including a stop at the project. She couldn’t believe we called it a project. She said she expected huge brick buildings with apartments and some clothes lines crisscrossing concrete yards in the back. We had a few brick buildings I explained, but they were town buildings and banks. This was our project.

This is not my usual musing. It is the story of my last night’s archeological dig in my den. Curiosity started the whole mess.

In my den I have a large furniture piece with a cushion for seating. Underneath the cushion is storage. I wanted to know what is there. I had to move all sorts of stuff to get at the storage. I found stacks of CD’s. I took a few. I also found 3 DVD’s, all the seasons of Clatterford, one of my favorite BBC series. My DVD player has bitten the dust, dead of old age, so I will have to use my outside DVD player to watch them.

That wasn’t the end. I saw a couple of boxes filled with unknowns. In order to get at the boxes I had to move pictures, baskets, a kite, an Elvis wig, a Jelly Belly machine and empty small bottles saved for a project. Inside a one box I found vintage Wilton cake toppers including hula dancers, palm trees, cowboys and soccer players. They are so wonderful I wanted to bake a cake. Another had photo Christmas cards, all black and white of people I don’t know. I have used them as Christmas decorations. I also found old cook books of recipes from movies. I found some tins. Inside one were old Christmas tags and cards. Now, keep in mind that in order to get to all these I had to move so much stuff it covered the furniture and floor. It was hot so I had to keep stopping for a cold drink and a bit of a rest. Finally I had finished exploring. I started putting everything back. I also ended up reorganizing so I could get at some of those tins again. I was exhausted.

When I was a kid, my closet floor was always covered with a pile, a layered pile. I had to organize it often so I’m thinking that was practice for last night. I have become adept at reorganizing a mess.

Today is a switch from spring to summer. I am taking down the storms from the doors and putting in the screens, more heavy labor. My poor sloth is screaming in protest.

The morning is hot, already 76°, but luckily there is a wind. The clouds are scattered. It will be a good day.

It is the summer solstice, the longest day in the year, the first real day of summer, but this is a flimflam, a deception. Starting tomorrow, the days get shorter. Sadly, even pessimistically, we get closer to fall every day.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the release of Jaws. I saw it on the first day. I stood in line for what seemed like hours at the movie theater. The only consolation to my waiting was the line behind was so long it disappeared around the corner. I’ll never forget the opening theme, the crescendo. I swear my heart started beating out of my chest with the same intensity. I’ll never forget that opening scene with the sound of the buoy, the view of the swimmer from below then the first tug then the back and forth and her screams. I swear I sat on the edge of my seat, my back stiff. After she was pulled under for the last time, the stillness of the ocean was almost just as frightening.

When I have my movies on the deck, my July 4th movie, alternates between Independence Day and, of course, Jaws. I decorate about the same every July 4th. For Independence Day, I have Stars and Stripes on placemats, napkins, bowls and serving dishes. For Jaws, I have wine glasses with sharks, glass sharks, on the bottoms. I have shark napkins and life preserver napkins. My centerpiece is driftwood, a small shark looking piece of wood surrounded by shells. Jaws music greets my guests. One of my friends hated that movie. She came reluctantly to see it, drawn by the friends and food. Whenever the shark was on the screen, she covered her eyes, but she still had to listen to the music. My friend did not swim in the ocean for years, not even by the shoreline.

Right now I am watching a shark movie, a sort of getting into the spirit. The movie is Santa Jaws. The festive killer shark is wearing a Santa hat on its fin. After all, the action takes place on Christmas Eve.

I have a to do list, a short one. I have an empty dance card. That’s it for the day, for the next few days.

When I woke up, the sky was cloudy and the air humid, thickly humid, but the sun arrived not long after and blew the humidity away. The clouds went with it but only for the meantime. The day will be hot with a high of 78°, but tonight will be comfortable at 66°.

When I was a kid, I wore sleeveless blouses and shorts, not Bermuda shorts or short shorts, just regular shorts. I wore sneakers without socks. They were canvas sneakers, usually Converse white sneakers. That was my summer uniform. The only change each day was in the colors of my shirts and shorts. I never gave coordinating colors a thought. I just grabbed whatever clothes were in my bureau drawers. It was the 50’s, fashion was often iffy.

When I was in high school, my mother’s phone call was interrupted by the operator who said there was an emergency. It wasn’t, but it was Sister Melania, the principal at Arlington Catholic who wanted to talk to my mother. She asked my mother to be an officer in the newly formed Arlington Catholic Mother’s Guild. My mother became the correspondence secretary. She always felt a bit out of her element. The women dressed up for each meeting. They wore hats, mostly wide brimmed, and dresses perfect for a late 50’s, early 60’s cocktail party. My mother had few dress up clothes and only a hat or two so she borrowed from my aunt and some friends. I remember a picture of her all dressed up and sitting at the officers’ table. I don’t remember her dress, but I do remember her hat. It was wide brimmed. A ribbon was around the outside top middle, but what held my attention in that picture wasn’t the hat. It was the stole. Around her shoulders she was wearing a fox stole made from a real fox with brown, soft fur. The actual head of the fox held its tail in its mouth. It was grotesque. It was also strangely fashionable.

My sisters gave me the best gift one year. When they were cleaning out my mother’s house, they found her membership card for the guild. They had it framed and matted in a gold frame. I love it. I love the memories it brings and the thoughtfulness of my sisters.

The morning is ugly: breezy, damp and cloudy. Sporadic rain is predicted. The weather lends itself to laziness.

When I was a kid, rainy summer days never stopped me. I loved running in the rain, kicking up the water in the gutter beside the sidewalk and even riding my bike through big puddles to make waves of water shoot into the air. I’d raise my feet off the pedals as the water sprayed on each side of my bike. It was a bicycle parting of water, on the small side of the Red Sea. I got wet, but I never minded. My clothes dried quickly, my sneakers not so quickly.

When I was in Ghana, during my live-in, I used to walk to the compound where my host father’s wives and their babies and small children lived. The compound was enclosed but had an open space in the middle and small connected rooms with curtained doors all around the open space. We’d greet each other, our only conversation. I’d sit and watch meals being made, fufu being pounded and toddlers stumbling around the center concrete yard. If they got near me, they’d cry because I was white, the first white person they’d ever seen. What astonished me was that often a vulture would fly into the compound and walk around as if it owned the place. Nobody but me noticed. I loved seeing a vulture so up-close instead of in a movie circling a dead body. They were big ugly birds. I always thought of our sort of meeting as a strange encounter, one I’d never have imagined.

On a trip to Scotland, I traveled to Inverness and went to see Loch Ness. I wandered around. It was a huge loch. As I wondered, I kept my eyes on the water hoping to see Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, a crypdid. I wanted Nessie to be real.

My dance card this week has few entries, just uke. My social events are sparse, but I hope to add a few Saturday movie nights on the deck, but the nights need to be warmer. I’m hankering to entertain.

The morning is lovely. It is in the high 60’s and mostly sunny. The small breeze is just perfect. I slept in this morning. Both dogs were asleep, curled beside each other on the bed. It was after 10 before we all woke up. They knew when I woke up. Henry jumped off while Nala stretched.

I remember the house in Maine where we spent our family vacation one summer. Three memories are the strongest. My father bought lobsters one night for dinner for my mother and him. He put them on the floor, and they walked, maybe even ran, backwards. Duke, our dog, bent down to look and then kept barking. The lobsters scurried faster. My father then picked them up to save them from the dog though not from the pot.

Off the kitchen was a tiny room. A bookcase was under the window, and a couple of rocking chairs with small cloth covered pads on the seat and back were by the bookcase. I checked out the books, always glad for books. One I had never seen before. It was A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The poems were different than any I had ever read. They were as if a child, like me, had written them. The poems told of fairies, of climbing trees, of far off places and of dreaming. I became a lover of poetry.

One rainy day, the house was noisy. I took my book and went to the car and got comfy lying down on the back seat. The rain pattered the car’s roof and dripped down the windows. I was safe and dry. I fell asleep lulled by the rain.

I have other memories of that vacation, smaller memories, like listening to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on the radio, the sick field mouse in the yard, the small pier where the row boat was tied and the cold, cold Maine water.

This is my annual Father’s Day post, long but not even close to being long enough to tell you about my father, my amazing father, my funny and loving father. It brings back a rush of memories every time I read it. It makes me laugh and smile and long for my father. He was one of a kind in the best of all possible ways. This morning, as soon as I woke up, I wished him a Happy Father’s Day.

In my front garden are a couple of ground cover plants. They have been there since I first bought my house. My father planted them for me. One weekend he and my mother came down to visit. My dad brought his lawn mower, a hand mower, garden tools and those plants. While my mother and I shopped, my dad mowed the lawn in the front and the back. Both yards were fields no longer. He weeded the garden. I could see the flowers. The garden was lovely. I get to remember that weekend every time I go out the front gate and see my father’s plants. They touch my heart.

I have so many memories of growing up, of family trips and my dad trying to whack at us from the front seat and never succeeding, of playing whist in the kitchen, with the teams being my mom and me against my dad and brother, of Sunday rides, of going to the drive-in and the beach and of being loved by my dad. Memories of my dad are with me always, but today all my memories are of my dad, and my heart is filled to the brim with missing him. When I close my eyes, I see him so clearly.

On a warm morning he’d be sitting on the front steps with his coffee cup beside him while reading the paper. He’d have on a white t-shirt and maybe his blue shorts. He’d wave at the neighbors going by in their cars. They all knew him and would honk back. He loved being retired, and we were glad he had a few years of just enjoying life.

He was the funniest guy, mostly on purpose but lots of times by happenstance. We used to have Dad stories, all those times when we roared and he had no idea why. He used to laugh along with us and ask, “What did I say? What did I say?” We were usually laughing too hard to tell him. He was a good sport about it.

I know you’ve heard this before, but it is one of my favorite Dad stories. He, my mom and I were in Portugal. I was driving. My dad was beside me. On the road, we had passed many piggyback tandem trucks, all hauling several truck loads behind them. On the back of the last truck was always the sign Vehiculo Longo. We came out of a gas station behind one of those. My father nonchalantly noted, “That guy Longo owns a lot of trucks.” I was laughing so hard I could barely drive and my mother, in the back seat, was doubled over in laughter.

My father wasn’t at all handy around the house. Putting up outside lights once, he gave himself a shock which knocked him off his step-ladder. He once sawed himself out of a tree by sitting on the wrong end of the limb. The bookcase he built in the cellar had two shelves, one on the floor and the other too high to use. He said it was lack of wood. When painting the house once, the ladder started to slide, but he stayed on his rung anyway with brush in hand. The stroke of the paint on the house followed the path of his fall. Lots of times he set his shoe or pant leg on fire when he was barbecuing. He was a big believer in lots of charcoal lighter fluid.

My father loved games, mostly cards. We played cribbage all the time, and I loved making fun of his loses, especially if I skunked him. When he won, it was superb playing. When I won, it was luck. I remember so many nights of all of us, including aunts and uncles, crowding around the kitchen table playing cards, especially hi-lo jack. He loved to win and we loved lording it over him when he lost.

My father always said he never snacked, and my mother would roll her eyes. He kept chocolate, those miniature bars, under the couch, hidden from everyone else, but, we, everyone else, knew. He loved Pilot Crackers covered with butter. Hydrox was his preferred cookie. His vanilla ice cream was always doused with Hershey’s syrup. That man did love his chocolate.

My father was a most successful businessman. He was hired to turn a company around and he did. He was personable and funny and remembered everyone’s names. Nobody turned him down.

My father always went out Sunday mornings for the paper and for donuts. He never remembered what kind of donut I like. His favorite was plain with butter. He’d make Sunday breakfast when I visited: bacon, eggs and toast. I can still see him standing over the frying pan on the stove with a dish towel over his shoulders. He always put me in charge of the toast.

If I ever needed anything, I knew I could call my father. He was generous. When we went out to eat, he always wanted to pay and was indignant when we’d one up him by setting it up ahead of time that one of us paid instead. One Christmas he gave us all $500.00, not as a gift but to buy gifts.

My father left us when he was far too young. It was sudden. He had a heart attack. I had spoken with him just the day before. It was pouring that day, and I told him how my dog Shauna was soaked. He loved that dog and told me to wipe his baby off. I still remember that whole conversation. I still miss my father every day. 

This morning is close the window and put on a sweatshirt cool. It is cloudy and damp as rain is predicted. The high will only be 63°. I have no plans to leave the house. I need nothing and have nowhere I want to go. I have decided to make brownies. It has been a long while since I last baked, and I just happen to have all the ingredients. I also have a hankering for chocolate.

Today is Flag Day commemorating the adoption of the flag on June 14, 1771. The red, white and blue colors are symbolic. The red represents valor and courage, the white represents purity and hope while the blue represents justice and vigilance. The thirteen stripes represent the original thirteen colonies. The stars represent the 50 states. The flag’s current design was adopted in 1958. It was designed by 17 year old Robert Heft. The last change was the addition of the 50th star in 1959.

When I was a kid, my head was filled with all sorts of nonsense disguised as real. Much of it was from my mother. She was keeping us well and safe and believed what she told us. I didn’t swim for an hour. I had to wear a hat as the heat escaped from my head. I didn’t swallow watermelon seeds for fear of growing a full size fruit in my belly. Swallowed gum became an indigestible ball in my stomach which stayed for seven years. I still spit out my gum. You can’t be too safe! Some days are just too cold to snow. I am not blind from the TV but carrots would have cured my bad eyesight anyway. We all swallow spiders in our sleep. I still follow the 5 second rule. Some things are too good to waste.

I have no to do list, no chores. I swept yesterday. Today I rest.

Yesterday I did not post, an unusual day. I had an early concert and had to leave before eleven. I just ran out of time.

Today is the perfect weather day. It is 70° with mostly sun. The air is still. The window behind me is open, and I can feel cooler air so different from yesterday’s heat. The dogs have been out so much they even skipped their morning nap.

School was usually out for the summer by this time in June. We always got out earlier than the public schools even though we had more days off during the year, holy days and such. I remember we always called them public schools, not the East School or the South School. I don’t know why. My school was St. Pat’s.

The first days of summer were exciting, no early mornings, no uniforms, no schedule and no looking out the classroom windows longing to be free. I always did think of it as freedom.

Other than supper, summer meals were whatever. I always had cereal in the mornings, my Rice Krispies, usually in front of the TV. Lunch was a sandwich, almost always bologna with yellow mustard and sometimes hot peppers, the ones with a stem. I never cut the slices well from the roll of bologna. One side was usually thicker than the other. The soft bread, the Wonder Bread, didn’t handle the odd sliced bologna well. It got holes. I had to hold the sandwich with two hands so it wouldn’t fall completely apart. Dessert was on the run, cookies, Oreos if we had any. Chocolate chips were a close second. Supper sometimes was a bit more casual but generally was much the same as the rest of the year with meat, potatoes and a vegetable. The only fresh vegetable we ever had was corn on the cob if it was ripe. We’d slather the ears with butter and salt. If we had a barbecue, it was usually hot dogs with yellow mustard and piccalilli, French’s mustard and Howard’s piccalilli.

Yesterday, I switched over to my summer clothes, vacuumed upstairs and even made supper instead of grabbing something easy. My poor sloth is distraught. Today I have a to do list, but it is intentionally short.