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“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

March 8, 2013

Earliest I sloshed my way to the mailbox and then to the driveway to get the papers. My road is slush covered. Tire marks show the route of my paper delivery, and when I got inside, I could see my footprints. It is lightly snowing, slanted and from the northeast, but I can also hear drips on the deck from the roof. The weather for today is rainy and cold with temperatures in the 30’s. I just hope it stays above freezing. The wind was with us all night but has since pretty much disappeared. On the early news was a house which had fallen into the ocean. I suspect it won’t be the last as the rain pits and wears away the dunes. This is just ugly. The only bright spot is I have heat and electricity.

I stood at the back door while the coffee perked. The storm is a bit mesmerizing with the snow coming across rather than down. The railing on the deck outside the door has an inch or more of what used to be snow and is now slush. That slush is the color of cement and Gracie’s paw prints look permanent as if she walked across the new part of a sidewalk. Lots of birds are hovering around the feeder, the squirrel buster feeder. I filled it the other day so there is plenty of seed. All of the birds are gold finches still clad in their dull winter feathers.

March is a difficult month. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be the first spring month or the last month of winter. Easter is at the end of the month so March best make up its mind. Light dresses and pastels don’t work as well with winter coats.

I know they’ll be snow and frost and windshield scraping. I have lived in New England all of my life and haven’t thought about moving anywhere else. Winter is the price we pay for spring and fall, especially fall. All I ask is a sunny day, a winter’s sunny day is fine with me. I know the winter sun is sharper and colder, but sun is sun, and it makes me glad.

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“When you can’t figure out what to do, it’s time for a nap.”

March 7, 2013

The wind is howling and twisting and turning the pine branches which seem to bend enough to touch the ground. The rain began falling last night, and when I woke up, I could hear it on the roof and windows. As I’m writing, wet snow, slanted by the wind from the north, is beginning to fall, but it hasn’t the look of permanence. The rain will be back, and the wind will howl all day into tomorrow.

The wind is the sort which is the backbone of every tale told by the fire, tales of creatures who roam the night, their sounds muted by the wind. Branches against the windows become scratches made by disfigured hands or even hooks. I remember those stories my father told us. We knew they weren’t real or at least pretended to know, but fear is more easily muted in a warm house with lots of lights and closed doors and my father to protect us.

We did a couple of errands yesterday and today we’ll stay home. It is a day not fit for man nor beast. I had to push Gracie out the door this morning, and the trauma has kept her napping on the couch for hours. Maddie and Fern, neither of whom had any trauma, are also napping. I imagine theirs are gestures of solidarity.

Today is laundry day maybe. I did bring it down from upstairs, but that doesn’t mean anything. The laundry bag can sit against the cellar door for a day or two without me caring. The old me, the before I retired me, would already have had the laundry washed, dried, folded and ready for upstairs. The retired me just dropped it by the door.

The day is ugly. I have no ambition, but I don’t really need any. I have a new book that seems to want my attention. I didn’t make my bed on purpose, not out of laziness but rather because the thought that today, a dark, dismal, rainy day is perfect for a nap in a cozy, warm bed.

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“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

March 5, 2013

It is, as my mother would have described it, a raw day, the sort where you feel chilled to the bone from the cold and damp. Right now there is a snow shower with small flakes being blown about by the wind. It won’t amount to anything, but its mere existence is beyond the pale. “Too much, too much,” I whine to no one but myself.

The weather in today’s Cape Times predicted the rest of the week much like today. Each day has the possibility of rain or snow showers. Saturday will be the first sunny day, if the paper’s prediction is correct. I went out earlier and filled the bird feeders. Gracie didn’t even bother to get off the couch until she heard me drop something. She then came to the deck, checked out what I was doing and then went right back inside the house, back to the couch.

Last night I was so tired I went to bed around 9:30, unheard for me, the night owl. I slept through until 8 and stayed in bed under the covers a little bit longer. I was too warm and cozy to face this day. I could see the sky through my window and nothing about it was inviting. When I came downstairs, Gracie went right outside. That surprised me as usually I have to open the door. Not this time: I never closed the back door last night. I guess I didn’t force Gracie out one more time but, instead, just shut off the light in the den and went upstairs to bed.

My legs are still wobbly from the vet bill yesterday. It was closer to $400 than $300, and this was a well dog visit, but the outcome couldn’t have been better. Gracie is healthy, and the vet said she is beautiful. If she didn’t have some grey on her muzzle, the vet said she’d think Gracie is still a puppy. She told me whatever I’m doing is working well as most boxers she sees tend to be overweight, but not Miss Gracie. She also got her nails done yesterday, like a sort of mini-spa.

When I was a kid, we had a boxer named Duke. He never had a well dog visit. He got rabies shots I think but nothing else. My father used to douse him in flea powder periodically. He ate canned dog food with horse meat. He was free to roam anywhere he wanted, and he did. He wasn’t supposed to get on the couch, but he always slept there when we weren’t around, and we could hear him get off the couch in the mornings when we’d go downstairs. Duke lived a long, long life for a boxer though he wasn’t pampered, didn’t eat all natural foods, ate Oreos my sisters fed him and anything else left on our plates. I don’t know if there is a lesson in that. I know we people are less immune to germs because our lives are so antiseptic. Maybe it’s the same with dogs.

I had an idea to do a couple of errands today but that thought disappeared with the first flake. I’m not even going to bother to get dressed. I will out-sloth a sloth today! Maybe I’ll pay some bills so I can claim a bit of industry.

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“I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”

March 4, 2013

The sky is so blue it defies description. The sun is shining brightly, but it’s not enough. The day is still cold. A breeze, maybe even enough to be called a wind, is keeping the warmth at bay. Spring is always late to Cape Cod, and I know that wind which seems to blow most days is to blame.

My garden has more buds and even has some flowers, but the pile of snow by the driveway has only melted a little. I think it’s winter’s way of reminding us that it still holds sway. Last night we had a snow shower.

The garden centers are still empty.

Today Gracie has a well dog visit at the vets. Next week I have my annual physical. I have a feeling Gracie will do better than I. She eats better food, has more exercise and stays away from sweets. She gets checked for heart worm. I get checked for cholesterol. I’d rather be checked for heart worm. I stand a better chance of a low number.

I always watch The Amazing Race. I love to see the countries they visit. On this race they have already been to Bora Bora and are now in New Zealand, two strikingly beautiful countries. I’ve watched the program so many years I know what the teams can expect though I don’t know the specific tasks. I know swimming is probably involved as is driving a car with a shift. Heights too often come into play. If I know that, why don’t all the teams? On most races there is at least one team member who can’t swim or is afraid of heights or doesn’t know how to drive a shift. On this race, a team of brothers didn’t know how to swim. One of the first tasks was, of course, in the water. They were eliminated that week. Last night driving was involved: one member of a team had only a couple of lessons driving a shift. Her car stalled and you could hear her grinding the gears, but she did finally manage the task after several tries. I’m too old for The Amazing Race. It is a younger person’s race and most of the older couples are eliminated fairly early, but I do have a job in mind. I want to be that person who goes from country to country setting up the tasks and planning each leg. I was born for that job!

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” Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.”

March 3, 2013

A dismal, dark day is becoming the norm. No change in the weather until Tuesday at the earliest. It’s cold: the temperature was 36˚ when I left for breakfast. I know March can be a raw, snowy month, but I’m hoping for something better. I saw a yellow bud in the garden this morning. I don’t know what flower it will be, but I was excited to see color. My clothes today are blue and grey. Even I am drab.

The feeders are empty, and I noticed the suet feeder must have fallen. I’ll have to bundle up to go out to refill the four feeders and rehang the suet.

I have new mice news. For nearly two weeks, none were in the trap upstairs so either they had become quite cagey (ha!) or there were no more. I chose to be optimistic and figured I’d relocated the whole population so I decided to move the trap to the cellar. Maddie loves to go down there, and I know there are mice in the cellar. When I had the two Siamese cats, they stayed in the cellar for hours. The death count was 17: 16 of theirs and one by drowning. Yesterday I checked the trap and I had caught my first cellar mouse. He is now living a mile and a half from here. I wish him well. This afternoon I will check the trap again.

This is the first winter I’ve ever hibernated. We don’t do trivia on Thursdays, and I haven’t seen a movie in a while. I don’t even grocery shop anymore. I wake up every morning and try to figure out the day and if I have anything on my calendar. When I do, I groan a little. I like being home reading and wearing my cozy clothes knowing I can nap should I so choose. I do other things like an occasional cleaning rampage, and the other day I organized the recipes I had snipped from newspapers and magazines. One of the folders I labeled Make These, and I will.

Sunday used to be my busiest and my least favorite day of the week. I’d empty the litter boxes, run the dishwasher, go to the dump, change my bed, do laundry and correct papers. I’d go to bed early as I used to get up at 5 or 5:15.

Looking at that old list of my Sunday chores gives me a bit of a chuckle. Now it takes me three or four days to accomplish the same tasks. I’m no hurry.

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“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

March 2, 2013

Today I’ll be at the MultiCultural Festival most of the day. We are having a Peace Corps table and taking turns passing out literature and answering any questions. The event opens with a parade of flags at 9:30, and I’ll be there with the Ghanaian flag. All day long there will be performers from a variety of countries, an international cafe’ and tables selling goods from other countries. I’ve been hankering for a bit of shopping, and this may be just the time.

I have favorite countries and favorite places in other countries. Mind you, all of these do not include Ghana which is, after, all my favorite country second only to home. Today the travelog is my favorite country, Portugal.

We drove as far north as you can go without crossing into Spain. Going through some villages, I had to wait for the green light as the road fit only a single car. Oxen pulled carts were driven on the small roads, and I had to pass them with the utmost caution. The roads were so windy we could see where we’ve been from where we were. I saw Iron Age ruins and Roman ruins still in the process of being excavated. The food was wonderful, and I remember a small restaurant on Easter Sunday where I ate kid. We stayed one night in Nazaré, a fishing village. Women, widows, dressed in black sat along the side of the walk. Dinner was at a restaurant by the water, and through the huge front window we watched the ocean splash over the rocks and the reddest sun go down behind the rocks. Dinner was a whole bowl of shellfish.

In Obidos, we walked the top of the wall surrounding the small village. All of the houses in the old part of the village were white with red roofs. We wandered the narrow streets where we saw small houses covered in colorful flowers.

The town I loved the most was Miranda do Douro, in the northern most part of Portugal. From my room I could see the lights of the Spanish border station. The town reminded me of one in an western movie, one with dirt streets and small buildings close together bordering the road. In the church was a statue of the Christ Child. It has a wardrobe of different outfits, and his clothes are changed periodically. Bougainvillea covered the fronts of house and overhung the wooden fences. Everyone of them was in bloom.

I have always said I won’t visit a country twice (except, of course, for Ghana), but I might just make an exception for Portugal.

 

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“I went to a restaurant that serves “breakfast at any time” so I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.”

March 1, 2013

Gracie and I finally made it to the dump yesterday morning then we went to Agway, a store which welcomes dogs on a leash. It was a perfect Gracie day. In the afternoon it rained a little, but in the late afternoon the sun made another attempt to break through but wasn’t successful. I figure the sun got a bit miffed and decided to stay away a bit longer. Today’s weather is like yesterday’s and the day before that and on and on: cloudy with a chance of rain. The forecast does change a bit for tonight: cloudy with a chance of snow showers. I’m beginning to feel like a mole. (Since I posted this the sun has managed to break through the clouds for just a little while. At first I thought it was a meteor signaling the end of the Earth but my instinctive memories managed to resurrect the word sun.)

I was a cocoa drinker most school mornings when I was a kid. My brother or sister (I forget which one) was a tea drinker. My mother always served the tea in a flowered pot. Thinking back on that, it’s kind of neat to have a pretty pot on the table in the morning though back then I didn’t appreciate the gesture. My cocoa was made in the cup. My mother would put some cocoa granules in the cup, add some milk, stir the two together then add hot water. The cocoa always had some bubbles on the top. We  usually had toast, and in the winter my mother would make oatmeal to sustain us on the cold walk to school. My favorite breakfast was boiled eggs served in egg cups. The eggs cups were yellow chickens. Many were missing their beaks. My mother toasted the bread and sliced it into strips so we could dunk it in the egg. She’d cut the top off the egg and we’d dunk for the yolk. I have those egg cups now. My mother gave them to me when I moved into my house. She thought I should have some memories from my childhood. The egg cups have Fannie Farmer etched across the bottom. I never noticed that when I was a kid.

I had cereal for breakfast yesterday for the first time in years. I think that’s why my childhood breakfast memories popped into my head. Cereal was our warm school morning breakfast and our Saturday morning watch TV breakfast. My mother had boxes of different cereals lined up in the kitchen. My brother liked Cheerios. I was a Rice Krispies fan. I think Corn Flakes also made an appearance though we thought it was an adult cereal. It didn’t do tricks like snap, crackle or pop. I like Corn Flakes now so maybe we weren’t far off. I think a banana really dresses up a bowl of Corn Flakes.

This morning I had coffee and an onion bagel with cream cheese. It was a most satisfying breakfast.

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“Sewing mends the soul.”

February 28, 2013

Since Sunday it has rained every day but one. That was the teaser day when it looked as if spring was finally poking its head out of the snow, but that was just a single joyful day. Yesterday it poured and today is dark and grim, the kind of day when you know it’s going to rain but don’t know exactly when. Gracie and I haven’t yet done our dump run. It was pouring too much. We’ll go today before it starts to rain.

My neighbor is taking classes to be a masseuse. She asked if she could practice on me. It took me a nano second to agree. Yesterday I got a wonderful massage. She spent over an hour making me so relaxed my limbs forgot how to work. It was wonderful! When I was leaving, she asked if she could practice on me again and give me another massage. You can guess my answer!

The pant leg of my cozy pants caught on the bureau knob and a small hole became a large one. I grabbed my trusty stabler. I do have a sewing kit complete with everything I could have needed to sew the hole shut, but the stapler worked quickly and the hole disappeared. I just hope the staples don’t rust in the wash!

When I was in Ghana, I made my own bedroom curtains, a feat for which I felt accomplished because of my total lack of sewing skills. I could have had them made, but I wanted to give them a try. My room had a whole wall filled with two really large, long windows and another wall with a much smaller window. These windows had screens, and glass pieces like shutters which opened and closed with levers. I measured the length and height of the windows using a piece of cloth I already had as the measuring piece then went to the market and bought a cloth which was sort of a rusty-brown. The cloth had a pattern at the top and the bottom. I cut the cloth into three window pieces, hemmed the bottom of each so the pattern was still there then used string under a top seam so I could attach the curtains to the windows as I had no rods. The curtains looked great and gave me a sense of privacy, a rare commodity those days in Bolga where a white person was a curiosity.

I also made a lamp shade. I used a beautifully colored basket I had bought in the market. Since those days, Bolga baskets can be bought here and are really expensive. They are distinctive with their vibrant colors and handles with red leather. I probably paid a cedi or two and was definitely paying too much as bargaining still meant I’d over-pay. I cut out the bottom of the basket and fashioned a holder for the lightbulb from a hanger to replace the bottom. In my living room I had one light bulb on a long cord hanging from the really high ceiling, and the shade was for that bulb. Once it was attached to the bulb, it looked great though the room was far less bright than it had been. The top rim of the basket made a circle of light on the floor beneath the shade. In the rainy season, the buggy season, that circle light would be black by the end of the night, black with dead bugs.

I didn’t make anything else for my house. Those two, the curtains and the shade, were my only attempts at domesticity.

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“Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”

February 26, 2013

Gracie is my barometer. She has been in and out all morning so I know it’s warm outside. When she first went out, I watched her run the perimeter of the yard at top speed. When she came inside, she was panting and had the usual amount of spit on her face. I also have the front door open for her. She loves to sit there for hours and look outside. My street, though, is so very small I can’t imagine what holds her attention except in the late afternoon when people walk their dogs by the house. That sends Gracie into a frenzy of barking and jumping at the door. She is not a lover of dogs unless she can meet them on her own terms: face to face with plenty of sniff time and no human interference.

Today is another I have nothing on my list to do day. Yesterday I finished all my chores and also swept and wet mopped the kitchen floor. I have no idea what compels me to do these household chores. I just know that every now and then I get the cleaning bug, a virus for which I wish there was a cure.

My mother didn’t work outside the house when we were kids. She spent the day at home doing laundry and cleaning. I know I always had clean clothes, my bed was made every day, the rug in the living room was vacuumed, my blouses and skirts were ironed and the dust was gone, but I seldom saw her cleaning. It was almost like the shoemaker and the elves, but it was really because my mother did it all when we were in school. The only thing I did see was my mother making dinner every night. In my mind’s eye, I can see her at the kitchen sink, her back to the door, as she peeled potatoes, cut them up and put them on to cook. The stove was behind her to the left on the wall opposite the sink. It was white. All the appliances were white back then. Harvest gold and avocado hadn’t yet made an appearance. The kitchen was small with very little counter space. The fridge was beside the sink with a small counter in between them. That’s where my mother kept her dish rack with a rubber mat underneath. The mat was opened at one end so the water from the dishes went back into the sink. My mother believed in air drying dishes. I do too.

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“Come, gentle Spring! Ethereal Mildness! Come.”

February 25, 2013

Today I woke up nearer afternoon than morning. It had been a late night. I watched the Oscars at my friends’ house then came home, checked e-mail and watched a little TV. Before I realized it, the time had slipped away and it was after 3.

Yesterday it poured all day, but last night, as I was going home, the rain had turned to heavy snow and it was slushy and slippery, but right now the day is lovely with blue skies, lots of sun and a bit of warmth. I have feeders to fill, dog food to buy and laundry to do. That’s my agenda for the day. I hope I can manage.

I can see the white flowers of the drooping snowdrops in my garden. They don’t mind snow or cold. They are spring’s first miracle. Other green shoots are just appearing through the soil, but in one part of the front garden, the dafs have grown high. Perhaps yellow buds will be next.

Winter is beginning to weight me down. I am tired of cold and snow. I don’t remember ever before being so anxious for spring. Usually I just hibernate with good books, and I’m fine with that and patient with the weather. Maybe all the rain we’ve had, those days without heat or the heavy snowstorms have pushed me to ache for spring. I want one day when the deck is the perfect spot to be.

I don’t like vacations centered on the beach, even when I’m sick of winter. I want to see things, to eat new food and to hear a language not my own. I like old places, even ancient places. The fun of a new city is wandering and getting lost and finding wonders on the way. Sometimes I take all rights or all lefts. I like to sit in the sun at a table at a sidewalk cafe and drink coffee and watch the world go by. When I shop, I look for the unusual. I take a lot of pictures. I am partial to doors and windows. I always think of the generations of people who looked through those same windows and I wonder what they saw. I walk so much I am exhausted and always fall asleep early.

Today I’ll have no adventures, but I do have some sun and some warmth. I guess that will have to do.

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