While the coffee was brewing, we, the dogs and I, watched the birds from the deck as they flew in and out of the feeders. A couple of the feeders need to be refilled. The birds are eating me out of house and home. I have only a small bag of sunflower seeds left. I noticed a mourning dove this morning. I’ll have to get mixed seeds and throw some below the deck as doves are ground feeders.

Last night was cold. I shut all the windows and wore a sweatshirt. I was glad the dogs snuggled while we were in bed. This morning I checked the weather for the week. The heat will be back on Thursday and Friday. The sweatshirt will be put away and the windows reopened for the meantime.

My walk to school wasn’t very far. In my mind’s eye I can see everything on that walk, the walk I took going and coming for eight years. Most of it was a straightaway. Older houses lined the sidewalk. Maple trees shaded the walk. I remember one house, probably the oldest house, was below the height of the sidewalk. A set of steps led down to the house. I always wondered how the house got there. I crossed the tracks, the same tracks I sometimes walked which led to the station. I only had to cross one road before I arrived at school.

When I was a kid, I ate some vegetables. I loved corn, even creamy corn which spread across my plate. I ate peas but only baby peas. Carrots were hidden, mixed with mashed potatoes. I never questioned the color of the potatoes. We ate canned beans, yellow and green, and French green beans. I loved potatoes of any sort, especially mashed. We ate French fries mostly on Friday nights with the fish sticks. My father ate canned asparagus. It always flopped over on his fork. He never did like fresh asparagus.

When I was a kid, the future was the next day or, if I was being farsighted, the weekend. The only times I was keeping track of days were the countdowns before Halloween and before Christmas. I’m sort of back to that now. I keep a dance card of events for the week. That is as far in the future as I need to know. Time takes care of itself.

I will never tire of these lovely days. This morning’s air has a coolness leftover from last night. A bright sun is framed by the deepest blue sky. The trees in the back are still so ladened with green leaves much of the yard is in shadows with only a spot of sun here and there. The birds are dining and taking turns at the feeders. The dogs are sleeping. I am drinking my second cup of coffee. We are all content.

When I was a kid, Sundays always started with mass. I didn’t have a choice. The alternative was a mortal sin symbolized in my catechism by a blackened milk bottle and an afterlife of eternal damnation in the fire pits of hell. I was afraid of both so I went to mass every Sunday. When I was younger, I paid attention and gave all the correct responses in Latin. When I was older, I sometimes smuggled in a book surreptitiously and sat in a corner to read it. With my head bowed while I was reading, I looked pious.

Today is another one of those days when my muses have deserted me. I wrote a few ideas, but they didn’t lead anywhere so I deleted them. One was about fashion. I had little fashion sense when I growing up. I always wore a uniform so it didn’t matter, but I do remember one Christmas when I got the best clothes, fashionable clothes, what everyone was wearing. I got a pink fuzzy sweater, a bright pink fuzzy sweater. I got ski pants, black stirrup ski pants, and a pullover ski jacket which had a zipper from the top and a zippered pocket. I wore it all the time even on the coldest days.

The spiders are taking over. Every day there are new webs and rebuild webs. This morning I saw a web which crisscrossed from one leg to another to another on a dining room chair. It is gone now. The top of one lampshade has a new web every morning. Other webs stretch from one frond to another on some plants. I have become frenzied in my search.

This uke week includes practice, my lesson and two concerts.

The morning is cloudy and dark. Every now and then a wind blows. The high will be 71°. Tonight will get down to the 50’s. I could do errands today, but I’m thinking today is a good day to stay home. I’ll do my errands tomorrow.

Yesterday, I filled the bird feeders, my single accomplishment for the day. Today, I have no to-do list. I’ve decided, instead, to support my inner sloth.

Today I muse.

When I was a kid, one of the talents I developed and was most proud of was my ability to dunk a Graham cracker in cocoa and eat it before it dissolved into the cup. It took timing and finesse. I still dunk, but now I use a biscotti and dunk it into coffee, a grown up choice I guess.

I always thought the milk left in the bowl after the cereal was gone was the tastiest. The only way to drink it was by lifting the bowl to your mouth, but you had to be careful as sometimes the milk sloshed from the rim of the bowl.

We always had white bread. It was soft white bread. Peanut butter, when I tried to spread it on the bread, always tore a hole, but I used the peanut butter like paste and repaired the hole.

I always thought the praying mantis was the most amazing bug. I remember watching one for the longest time when I was a kid. What I found amazing was it stood upright and really did look like it was praying. Its eyes were bulging and a bit scary looking. It never flew. Last night I watched The Deadly Mantis from 1957. It flew. It ate people.

Saturday was the busiest day. My father did his errands uptown. He’d drop off and pick up his white shirts at the Chinese laundry, have his hair trimmed and visit a few friends. At home, he’d do his mowing in the summer and his raking and burning leaves in the fall. The winter meant no outside work unless it snowed. Every father on the street did the same. It was an unwritten rule.

We didn’t have much when I was a kid, but we had butter, not margarine, and the milkman always left one bottle of chocolate milk with the white. It was supper during the week but dinner on Sundays because there was always a roast, fancy meat.

We couldn’t eat meat on Fridays. Sometimes we’d have frozen fish sticks with French fries for supper or English muffin pizzas. My favorite supper was fried dough slathered with butter and a bit of salt. We stood in line at the frying pan.

I’m watching, in between words, a science fiction film from the 50’s. It is Saturday and time for Creature Double Feature. I chose The Crawling Eye, but The Tollenberg Terror, released in 1958, started instead. I tried twice for The Crawling Eye with no luck. Finally, I set Google on a task. Come to find out they are the same movie with different titles. The Tottenberg Terror was the name in England while we got The Crawling Eye. For my second creature feature I’m hoping to find The Fiend Without a Face.

Today is another delightful day, sunny and warm. It will reach 75°. A few clouds dot the pale, blue sky, but the sun still streams. I have nothing on my dance card. I’m glad for the quiet day. I’ll fill the bird feeders and water the deck plants. That’s it.

When I was a kid, our neighborhood was seldom quiet. Every house had kids, and they played outside. A hill dominated the backyards. Each house took care to mow the patch of grass nearest them on the hill. We had one grass fanatic. She was one of the few to use a power mower. She mowed in rows and mowed a square on the hill behind her clothesline. In her mind, the square was her hill grass property border. If anyone walked on her square, she always yelled for the transgressor to get off the hill. We figured she kept guard through the kitchen window. All the kids laughed at her and made fun of her behind her back, but she did have the greenest, most well-kept hill grass.

My father loved his grass. He always mowed it in the same pattern. Saturday was mowing day. I can still hear and remember the clicking sound of the blades as he mowed up and down the lawn and around the bushes in the side yard which had the biggest patch of grass. The last house they lived in had a front lawn. When I’d visit, my father always asked if I’d seen how great his grass looked. “It’s the best lawn you’ve ever had,” I’d tell him.

Dinner last night was fun. I had everything ready so I could sit and enjoy my friends. We started on the deck. The night was quiet. I had a fire lit in my chiminea. The burning piñon wood filled the air with its sweet aroma. We noshed on a charcuterie board and sat for a while. The dogs were good. They even fell asleep on the deck. We moved inside for dinner which was pesto lemon shrimp fettuccini and crispy bread. For dessert we had cannolis. We sat eating and talking and laughing for the longest time.

Dinner was delicious but being with old friends was the best part of the evening.

Some days seem just perfect. Yesterday was one of those. I had my uke lesson, and it was fun playing new music. I got gas, seemingly a mundane task, but the sun was shining, and the trees were gently swaying. I was glad to sit and watch. I stopped at the dump on the way home and chatted with the man who always helps to empty my trunk. We both loved the weather. I also stopped for a blood test, a common event. I was the only one there, an uncommon event. I got home, and it wasn’t even noon yet, a boon. Even though I only did mostly errands, I felt quite content. It was just one of those mornings when everything fit.

Friends are coming for dinner. This doesn’t happen often. I have my shopping list and my flow chart. My house is clean. The floors are sparkling, and for the meanwhile, the spiders’ webs are gone. I have yet to prep the dogs. That will be the toughest task.

Before I left for Ghana, my mother and I went shopping. I was packing for two years. I had a list of suggested items. I was allotted eighty pounds of luggage. We had to buy two sets of sheets and a couple of towels. We bought dresses because women wore dresses in public. We bought cotten underwear, packages and packages, as was suggested. The list of toiletries was long. I had a couple of pairs of sandals. I had pictures of my family. I brought a couple of books. I remember one was The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My parents bought me luggage, an Instamatic camera and slide film. The luggage was red. I had to send the film home to be developed as there was no place in Ghana.

It didn’t take long to realize how useless the list had been. It said not to bring spices as Ghana had plenty. The only spice Ghana had was hot pepper. I brought too many clothes. Ghanaian cloth was beautiful and inexpensive. Seamstresses charged little. Within the first six months, I wore only dresses I had had made. My sandals fell apart in the heat and humidity. I had them resoled in the market. They used pieces of tires for soles. I left tread marks. My deodorant caused boils. I could buy shampoo and toothpaste. We got a medical kit. I didn’t need to empty the drug store selves. I had an umbrella. Ghanaians only used umbrellas to be protected from the sun. I never used mine. I had an alarm clock, but it was unnecessary. The roosters crowed, and in the early morning, my students swept the school compound outside my window.

Well, it is time to get a move on. I have company coming!

Right now we have a fall morning chill at 65°, but the day will get warmer and will reach the 70’s. Through the trees in the back yard, I can see blue sky. The sunlight is dappling through the oak leaves. This is a lovely morning.

My father always carried a white handkerchief in his back pocket. In the old days, before we had a dryer, my mother used to iron his handkerchiefs. When I was young, I always gave him new ones for Christmas which I’d buy in a fancy package at the drug store. I remember the nuns too used white handkerchiefs. They used to tuck them under their sleeves at their wrists. A small corner of the white handkerchief usually stuck out for quick retrieval.

I have old fingers. A couple are arthritic which translates into trouble opening some bottle tops, especially the ones where you have to press in each side at the designated marks at the same time then turn the top. I have gotten so frustrated I have thrown the bottle. It travels far. My last resort is usually breaking the top with pliers. I use a fork to pull the sort of key on the tops of dog food cans. That works well. Sometimes, though, I just can’t get the bottles opened. They either sit in the cabinet until their expiration date or they get tossed. Getting old has its challenges.

In grammar school, I wore tie shoes. My mother had taught me how to tie bows when I was around five. My first bows were so loose they fell apart. I’d tie them tighter, and they’d become knots. That was sort of a Goldilocks experience of trying to find just right. It took me a while, but I finally mastered the art of tying bows.

We used to have reading class. We had thick readers with stories followed by questions. The stories were interesting. The questions were chronological and easy to look up if you forgot the answers. We used to get graded on silent reading. I always got an S for satisfactory. I figured if your lips didn’t move or your finger stayed off the text you got that S.

Over the blackboards in most of my grammar school classrooms were two rows of letters. It was the alphabet, A to Z, in cursive. The upper case, capital letters, had their lower case, small letters, right beside them. All the capital letters were fancy, but I thought the weirdest looking letters were Q, X and Z. It was a good thing we didn’t use them often.

Today is quiet, calm. It is a fall day. It is cloudy, dark cloudy, but warm, in the 70’s. Tonight will get down to the 50’s. I’d invent today if it didn’t already exist. The best days don’t have to be sunny.

When I was a kid, I wondered why on Labor Day nobody worked. Even my father stayed home. When I was older, I understood it was a day to honor the American worker, to commemorate the contributions of the labor movement. It was in 1887 when Oregon first celebrated Labor Day. Massachusetts followed that same year. Everything used to be closed on Labor Day. We had a barbecue. Labor Day was, for me, the summer’s last hurrah.

School always started the day after Labor Day. It was the end of freedom. No longer were the days mine. My life became regimented. I got up the same time every school day. My mother was my alarm clock, and she yelled up the stairs to tell us it was time to get up. Breakfast was always ready. I remember the tea pot with the ends of tea bags hanging out of the pot was always on the table. Breakfast was either eggs or cereal. After breakfast I got dressed in my uniform. The same uniform I wore every day. My friend and I walked to school together on the same route every day. We waited in the school yard for the bell. I sat at the same desk day after day. The lessons followed the same order except we had art and music once a week. Lunch followed by recess was the same time every day. When the school bell rang to free us from our chains, our proverbial chains, I ran home at breakneck speed. I changed quickly into my play clothes and ran outside. I didn’t want to miss a minute of my free time, the only free time every day. The street lights came on soon enough.

My dance card has only one listing for the week, my uke lesson on Wednesday. I haven’t left the house or even gotten dressed since Friday. I did do some cleaning. I vacuumed and polished. On my to-do list for today is to fill the bird feeders, change my bed, water the inside plants then take a nap. The sloth in me needs its time.

The morning is cloudy and damp. Rain is predicted. The only sounds I hear are the songs of birds. A male cardinal was at the feeder as were nuthatches and a chickadee or two.

When I was a kid, our TV was in the corner of the living room. It was, as all TV’s were, black and white. It had an antennae with rabbit ears wrapped in aluminum foil which was supposed to give us a better picture. I remember turning the antenna to find the best picture while my father gave directions like left or more to the right or hold it there. Whoever was closest to the TV had to get up and change the channel. When the TV needed service, my father would take out the tubes in the back. That always ended in disaster. He’d bring the tubes to the TV appliance store where the guy would check them and replace the bad ones. My father would bring them all home. He had no idea where the tubes belonged. He’d tinker for a while, unsuccessfully, then call the repairman to the house.

My father often cooked breakfast on Sunday mornings. He always made bacon and eggs. The eggs were fried in the bacon grease. He made sure to keep the yolks intact. I’d do my own toast. In my mind’s eye I can still see him at the stove minding the eggs.

My father hunted mosquitos. His weapon was a rolled up magazine. I remember waking up when my bed shook. My father, with his weapon, was moving on my bed trying to whack mosquitos on the ceiling. Standing on the bed was for added height. The ceiling had spots of smushed mosquito bodies.

We are all sharing the couch. I have one end, Nala has the other, and Henry is between us. This happens every morning. The dogs are creatures of habit.

Today is a day to be outside to take in the best of days. I was on the deck to watch the birds while my coffee was brewing. The nuthatches come in waves. The chickadees are quick to arrive, grab a seed and leave. Yesterday I saw a couple of crows and the cardinal pair. I’m glad I bought more seed.

This is a quiet week for me. The only scheduled event is my uke lesson. I won’t know what to do with all the time. I guess I could clean. Better yet, I could read, take a few naps or sit on the deck.

Saturdays have always been sacrosanct to me. When I was a kid, the whole day was mine. In the winter I’d go to the matinee or ice skate or go sledding if we had snow. In the summer, I’d sometimes ride my trusty steed, my bike, and wander the town. I seldom had a destination. Other days I’d walk all over. Sometimes I’d walk the tracks. Trains still came back then. I’d stand close to the tracks, close enough to feel the wind from the train as it raced by me. I’d put a penny on the track hoping the train would smush it. I’d walk the track which ended at the station. Across the street from the station was the turnout where the trains changed direction and headed back. Sometimes I’d head back like the train. I never found the end of those tracks. I remember the station master’s house. His job was to lower the gate and activate the red lights. The train always blasted its horn before the crossing. The house is still there, but now it is just an odd shaped regular house on the side of the tracks.

I love trains. I loved the subway when I was a kid. I’d kneel on the seat and look out the window. Once I took the train to Washington D.C. Ghana, when I lived there, had trains. I used to take the train from Accra to Kumasi. I always went first class which wasn’t expensive. I’d board the first class car and find a compartment. There were four big, comfy chairs in each compartment. Sliding doors closed off the compartments. I always felt a bit like Miss Marple. Those trains are gone now, but Ghana is hoping to bring them back. I wish we would do the same.

Today, in my Africa video, I saw two white men and a Ghanaian wearing a Lakers shirt.

The lovely weather continues. The days are warm and sunny while the nights are cool. Last night I even shut windows and put on a sweatshirt.

When the dogs go out during the late night, they are usually out and back inside quickly. Last night Henry came back inside looking for his treat but not Nala. I waited a while. It is seldom a good thing when Nala stays out. I called and called, no Nala. I figured she had caught something, and I was right. I grabbed my flashlight and went searching. She appeared and had what looked like a possum in her mouth. I had learned not to chase her so I went inside and shut the door. I knew she’d whack the door when she wanted inside the house, and over an hour later, she did. In the past, she has just dropped the possum and left it in the yard, and that’s what she did. This morning it was gone. The possum had played dead.

When I was a kid, I was always excited for school to start. I’d organize my new school supplies. I remember opening my pencil case and checking out everything inside it. I’d sharpen my pencil. I’d get my school bag ready and practice carrying it. We had to take a bath the night before school started. It was my only Monday night bath.

My mother made the best brownies. She used a square pan. I loved the crisp edges. She always frosted her brownies with chocolate frosting and put jimmies on top, sprinkles to those of you not from Massachusetts. It was the most amazing chocolate overload.

On school mornings, my mother usually made us a hot breakfast. First she’d make the tea and the cocoa. My brother was a tea drinker. I drank the cocoa. There was always toast. She’d make soft boiled eggs served in egg cups. On cold mornings, she often made oatmeal. I remember it was sometimes lumpy. We’d put sugar and milk on the oatmeal. The milk used to ring the bowl and submerge the oatmeal.

I need to do errands today. My larder is empty. I don’t even have bread. The dogs, Jack and the birds all need food. My car needs gas.

Tonight is the last play of the season, The 39 Steps. I have no more outside concerts. Summer is having its last hurrah.