The clouds and the sun are having their turns. Right now it is sunny. The wind is now and then. Snow flurries are predicted. I am still dismantling Christmas though all that is left is to put the gathered decorations in their boxes. The living room is clear and back to normal except for the tree in a white plastic bag standing in the middle of the room. It needs to go, to be hauled outside. The hall is an obstacle course of filled boxes. The dining room and living room have stuff on tables waiting for their boxes. I just have to get motivated.

When I was a kid, we all helped decorate the house, especially the tree. I remember my father and mother would pick the tree, set it up in the living room and then wait for the branches to fall. We’d decorate together. I remember it all. What I don’t remember is taking it down. My mother dismantled Christmas while we were in school. I remember the shock of getting home to a drab, undecorated house. I always missed the tree with its color and aroma the most. Now I have one incognito in my living room.

When I was a freshman in high school, we had a sex orientation lecture in the gym which also served as the auditorium. The chairs were stored under the stage. They were directors’ type chairs with red canvas seats. They were fun chairs because if you sat on one with a bit of force you bounced as did everyone in your row. I remember the girl sitting beside me at the lecture. I don’t remember her name. She was slight. She had several siblings. Those are the only identifiers I have. I remember her hands. During the lecture she constantly rubbed her hands together and she shook. That meant we all shook, the whole time.

When I was a kid, name calling and making fun of other kids was common. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me,” was the usual response. I always liked, “Takes one to know one.” And the ever popular, “I know you are but what am I.” Sometimes your mother got maligned, “So’s your mother.” The grammar school playground was a dog eat dog world.

The morning is lovely. It is also cold but not outrageously. The sky is as blue as any sky can be. I don’t see a single cloud. The air is mostly still. It is a pretty winter’s day.

Yesterday was busy. I made it to the dump, finally. My trunk was filled with trash bags. My back seat had the cans and papers and such. It was an overdue chore. My tree is empty, ready to go outside. My living room is back to pre-Christmas. It makes me sad. I love all the Christmas colors and decorations. Taking them down has made my world a bit drab.

When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in the city. We used to visit them often, on Sundays. I loved the city. My grandparent’s house was in the middle of the block. At one end of the block was a small corner store. That’s where I’d spend the dimes my grandfather would give us. The dimes were bribes. He wanted peace and quiet. The other end of the block had a house which opened its front window to sell Italian ice. I found that amazing. I ate cold, square Italian bakery pizza for the first time during one visit. I loved it.

I remember playing stickball on the street in front of my grandparents’ house. We used a broomstick and a half pink rubber ball. I was mostly the gofer. We also played stoop ball. The ball, an intact red rubber ball, was thrown at the front stoop by the batter. Fielders were spread out in the street. The batter hoped for distance off the stoop to get a high score. The fielders hoped for fly balls off the stoop. There were no real rules, and the scoring was often contentious. These were city games. We never played them at home.

My dance card actually has some entries for this week, all uke. I have been home most of the last two weeks. I have really missed people. The dogs are the worst conversationalists. They tend to spend their days eating and sleeping with an occasional trip to the backyard. The dump was actually exciting. I saw people, even said hello to a couple. They said hello back. I was thrilled.

I have designated today as finish the damn chores day. The hall is almost impassable because of the boxes and bags of Christmas waiting to be hauled downstairs. When I went to get the paper, I had to clean up trash pulled from the bags of the trash I had put by my car as part of my dump prep. I knew I was tempting fate as the bags were the perfect targets for the creatures of the night. They had a party! I definitely need to go to the dump.

I will finish here today and then add a picture. I just have to get Christmas put away which means hauling boxes, lots of boxes, up and down the cellar stairs, and I need to go to the dump. I’ll thwart those creatures of the night.

Until tomorrow!

The weather hasn’t changed. We tend to stay around the low 30’s, today we’re 30° exactly. We have a slight breeze. It spins the hanging brown leaves on the oaks. I still have trash. I also still have a bit of Christmas piled on the table. I need to bring more bins upstairs. I should finish today though I’ve said that every day for the last few days. I think I have a severe form of winter lethargy.

My high school graduation was outside, the first ever at my school. The girls wore white, the boys green. The boys sat on one side, the girls on the other. I could see my father and mother from my seat. During the ceremony, the scholarships were given out. I got a couple, but it is the first one I remember. After I got back to my seat, envelope in hand, I looked to my parents expecting applause or a way to go, girl. I got neither. Instead, there was my father asking, “How much? How Much?” I ignored him.

The first time I heard a rooster crowing was in Ghana, on a very early morning. It became a significant event. When I returned to Ghana, a rooster crowed outside my window on my first morning. I thought of it as a welcome.

In Ghana I learned to operate a motorcycle. It was a Honda 90, which was what I could afford, barely afford, from my living allowance. I bought it in Tamale, a little over 100 miles away from Bolga, learned how to operate it from the dealer then left for home. One road was all I took. It was straight up from Tamale to Bolga. I stopped a couple of times for water and to stretch my legs. It was a long ride and on the left. It was a significant event. I rode over a 100 miles, my first ever trip on a motorcycle.

My creative juices, my muses, are among the missing. I think they left me adrift so they could go somewhere warm. I have been sitting a while on the couch hoping for inspiration which hasn’t come. One dog is asleep on each side of me. Nala is snoring. They care nothing about my plight. I guess it is time for a stream of Coffee memory consciousness.

When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood of duplexes. In the duplex next to mine lived a photographer, his wife and I remember a son though there could have been more children. I remember seeing the father’s photos in the town paper. The wife was German. This was significant. Back then almost all the fathers were veterans of WWII. What I didn’t know was the wife was being called names like Kraut by one of the neighbors. The husband confronted him and the two men had a fight. I was right in the middle of the watchers. We followed them from yard to yard, lawn to lawn. We looked like people following golfers from hole to hole. That was the most monumental event, and its memory lived on. For years, the question, “Do you remember the fight? sometimes popped up in conversations.

This next memory occurred earlier than the memory above but popped into my head later. The field and the dead old tree trunk near my house were always a part of my memory until the horrific day they were cleared and then later replaced by apartments for the elderly. We kept our boundaries, them and us. We never played there, and they were never on my street then it happened. An ambulance, fire truck and two police cars came speeding up the hill their horns and alarms blaring. It was loud enough to get us out of our houses. I was young so this was exciting. We followed the cars and stood on the sides of the road where they were parked. I remember the crowd talking. Now I’d describe their conversations as speculations, guesses, and inside information which ran rampant. They brought a lady out on the stretcher, I could see her head, but her condition didn’t register with me. My most vivid memory of that day is not the lady but rather the excitement from the fire engine being on the street and from seeing the firemen carrying a hose and what looked like a Klingon weapon. I found out much later her robe had caught on fire from her stove and had burned her. I never heard anymore.

These are two rare memories. They just sort of showed up today.

Winter reigns. It is another grey, cold day. Right now it is 28°. The high for today will be 32°(insert snort of derision here). I could go to the dump but I doubt I will. I am into warmth and comfort. I am into cozies and hot coffee. I am into staying home. As Scarlett was wont to say, “I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”

We have a little bit of snow on the ground but only on yards and lawns and my car of course. The snow crunches underneath when I walk on it. We had a bit of a melt then the cold came back and everything froze. Walking takes attention.

When I was a kid, we’d walk across the field on our way to school. Winter walks were the most fun. The snow tops on the field often froze. We could never resist them. We’d put our school bags down, get running starts and jump on the snow tops. They would crack and send snow quake lines cross the field to break the snow. We watched the lines travel. They became snow quakes. They never moved in a straight line. They moved quickly across the snow tops. We always watched for a while.

Where I lived in Ghana is the hottest part of the country, the driest part of the country. The worst weather is during the Harmattan occurring from December to February. Intense, dry winds come and cover everything in dust. Cleaning doesn’t clean. The air is so dry that lips and heels crack. Mosquitos and most other bugs disappear. The water is turned off a few days during the week so filled buckets waited in the shower room for my nightly shower, a Harmattan bucket bath, and toilet flushing. I got hoarse from the dust, walked on my tiptoes when my heels cracked from the dryness, stopped missing the rain and learned to live with haze. The Harmattan had one bright spot, the nights. I did love the nights. They were cold, down to the 50’s. I snuggled under a scratchy wool blanket on my bed. I never imagined I would need a blanket in Ghana.

Today is another freezing day. I think my body is trying to hibernate as I tend to sleep until almost noon. Nothing outside is inviting. Even the dogs are quickly in and out. I am so much better, only the short of breath is left, and I can recuperate for another week without missing a thing. My uke leader now has the plague, my name for it, and has cancelled events for the week. The only item left on my dance card is the dump run for later in the week. I still need to put away Christmas, bring sick hampered my efforts because of all the up and down the stairs and my breathing; however, I’m going to start today and see how far I get.

Every kid I knew had pretty much the same childhood I did. My close friends and I and most kids we knew all wore the exact same clothes every day, our school uniforms. I never minded wearing one. It was just what we all did. For my mother, it was less money for a single uniform, some of which could be handed down, than new clothes every year for the four of us. I had all the kid stuff for every season. My friends and I skated together. We went to the Saturday matinees together. We were in school together for eight years. We joined brownies then Girl Scouts. We first joined the junior drill team on Saturday mornings then quickly moved to the regular drill team where we stayed for years.

Over time my friends and I moved in all different directions. I lost track when I was in Ghana, but I ran into a few much later on, many of them my friends from elementary school, those 8 years. Right away we were comfortable with each other. We had a shared history. We shared our childhoods.

I think seeing the dusting of snow we got last night has helped me remember when I was a kid, when cold was no never mind, when the deeper the snow, the better the storm. We raced on our sleds down the hill with our thoughts only on our speed and winning, of course. These friends I have known for over seventy years pop-up everywhere.

The morning is a delight, warm and sunny. It is 44°, almost deck weather. The dogs have been out for a while appreciating the day. Nala is lying in the sun stretched out in the warmth. As for me, I’m still ailing a bit. This whatever it is lasts a while. I missed two concerts this week, the first time I’ve missed any, and am still wavering about today’s concert. It just takes so much effort to get moving.

I traveled in the days of maps, travel books and brochures. I planned everything ahead of time for long trips. The eight weeks in South American were the most amazing. We did just about everything I’d planned and some surprising side trips I hadn’t. The start of our trip was Caracas. Eight weeks later we left from Rio having traveled a continent. During that whole trip, we met one American. He had just given his suitcase to a cab driver who wasn’t. The cab driver was a thief. We did meet a British woman on the 3 day boat ride from Paraguay to Argentina down the Paraná River, and she was the only one who spoke English on the boat. My two years of college Spanish held me in great stead on that trip as did the South American Handbook, put out by BOAC back then. The book was thick. It covered everything. I read through all the countries, made notes and compared that handbook to another handbook or two, but no other handbook came close. I used it to plan the entire trip.

On that trip, every geography book I ever studied popped into life. We managed to travel a good portion of a continent by ourselves. Mostly we rode in locally scheduled town to town busses, some long distances. The trains too were local, no tourist trains back then in Peru. We left Cusco to Machu Picchu on a train with all the women vendors on their way to markets. Some got off at each stop. We got off at the end, down the hill from Machu Picchu, the place which seemed to appear in every geography book I studied. You know, the place with the tall mountain in the middle and the whole city across in front of it. No tourists back then.

We rode regular buses and trains. We took a couple of flights because of time and distance. We had that one long boat ride and another couple of boat rides, short rides: by train from Quito to Duran, Ecuador then across by boat to Guayaquil. The next was a train ride from Cusco to Puno then a hydrofoil across Lake Titicaca from Peru to Bolivia. We stopped at the Islands of the Sun and the Moon and at Copacabana mostly to see the church of Our Lady of Copacabana. We walked and toured and and got all our information from the handbook. No one spoke English. We saw Incan ruins on both islands and we were awed by that Basilica. After wandering a while, we boarded the boat then across more of the lake to the Bolivian side to a bus to ride across the altiplano on our way to La Paz.

There must have been a border in Puno, or maybe not. Back then, in the 70’s, few American tourists were traveling country to country as we were so we were an oddity. Sometimes that meant quickly stamped in with a visa. Sometimes we waited.

That trip is my most spectacular trip. Awesome was everywhere. I saw bananas growing and mountains covered in snow. I rode through cities with their grand Spanish architecture cathedrals. I saw the front of the train from the back on quite the curvy rail on my way to the Valley of the Incas. I have memory drawers bursting with scenes from that trip. It was so amazing.

I am late today. I slept through the morning, on the couch again. If I had a roommate, the mirror under the nose would be have been in order to make sure I’m still alive. Nala slept with me. Henry went out and stayed a while. He was at the back door whining for me to let him in. We’re still stuck in the cold at 32°. Tonight we’ll get done to the 20’s.

When I was a kid, my least favorite season was winter. Christmas was over, and February vacation was a long January away. We had no days off from school in January. Most of our days looked the same. We’d play outside if we couldI remember doing homework on the kitchen table before dinner but after we’d played outside if we could . The snow on the road, on the hill, got slushy from the cars so we couldn’t go sledding on it anymore. We’d sled on the grassy hill behind my house. It wasn’t very tall, and you never went far, but the sled picked up speed right from the top of the hill.

Going fast on a sled is one of the joys of being a kid. The technique was widely known. We all used it. I’d run and jump so most of me was on the sled, only the bottoms of my legs were raised in the air. The key was the run. I’d run as fast as I could and jump on the sled just about the same time the sled hit the ground. The runners cut through the snow. Bits of snow flew in the air along the runners. The best was the crunching sound of snow meeting runner. I never had to steer until the end of the hill where you had to dodge clothes lines and some hot top. The further you went, the greater your mastery.

Another winter technique most kids mastered is walking in heavy snow, 6 to 8 inches at least. Arms are bent at the elbow just above but not touching the top of the snow. One leg at a time gets lifted above the snow top then down a bit further ahead. Lifting legs is the hardest part. To go fast takes more energy and more effort but fast is relative to height. The snow behind me was more piled than flat, a weird path needing more walkers.

I think snow is beautiful, newly fallen and untouched. I turn my lights on to watch the flakes fall. My backyard gets dog prints. It is the after snow to which I am not a fan. My plow guy didn’t show last winter after our one storm needing a plow. Luckily a neighbor, I didn’t know, came and shoveled me out. That was so kind. I need a plow guy.

Winter is stubborn. Once it has a hold, it keeps on holding. Today is partly cloudy and 30°. The high, now wait for it, will be 31°, cold, not chilly, but downright cold. I am still hibernating, trying to get rid of this malady. I missed a concert yesterday and might miss another tomorrow. I hope to be in fine fettle for Sunday’s concert.

I am at my animals’ beck and call. I can even interpret Henry’s barks unless he uses compound sentences. Both dogs have resorted to crying if I ignore them for even the shortest time, but that’s not what has me thinking. It’s beck and call. I wonder how I learned beck and call. Perhaps my mother was complaining just as I am but about us, the kids. I haven’t heard anyone use beck and call for a long time. I’ve heard beckon as in,”Winding roads that seem to beckon you,” from Old Cape Cod but only because we uke it. Words die out, disappear. Some deserve to die. Others will be missed, by a few of us at least. Doff is gone. Erewhile is too great to lose. I’ll just make an effort to save a few.

I taught my students bamboozle. They loved the word and used it in other classes. It wasn’t the definition they liked but the sound of the word. They pronounced it like balm-boozle, in their Ghanaian English accent. Their history teacher stopped and asked me about bamboozle as the word had appeared in several answers on the exam, and he didn’t know the word. I explained. He was impressed with them.

When I was a kid, the nun taught us how to look up a word in the dictionary. She explained how the words were organized by letter. I remember doing a practice sheet of finding the right pages for specific words. I got a dictionary that Christmas. It was on my list. I remember it was heavy and had a red cover. I still have a heavy dictionary with a red cover, not the same one, a later one. I used to keep it by my bed so I could look up words I didn’t know. Now it is stored in the bookcase of obsolete but still valuable books.