Today is fall. The sun is bright in a blue sky, for the meantime anyway, as clouds are predicted. The breeze is warm. The high today will be 66°. I’m still wearing flannel.

Nala loved her ride and loved the vet. She was so stressed, tongue in cheek here, that she fell asleep lying on the floor. She got her shots and her nails clipped. The tech who returned her to me said she is the nicest dog, a sweet girl. I agree, but I did have to bring in some hangers she stole and took outside and chase her for the bird seed loader.

When I was a kid, my mother woke me up every weekday morning, gave me breakfast, made sure I was dressed neatly in my school uniform, handed me my lunch and sent me on my way to school. It was the same each day, but I never noticed. I thought every day was special. Breakfast always included cocoa. I remember my mother made it with milk. There were always little bubbles on the top of the cocoa. Sometimes we had soft boiled eggs in chicken egg cups with sliced toast for dipping, oatmeal, always with a few lumps, or cold cereal, Rice Krispies for me. I’d hold the bowl to my ear and listen for the snap, crackle and pop.

The walk to school changed with the seasons. In the fall, the trees overhanging the sidewalk turned color then their leaves fell and covered the sidewalk. The leaves would turn brown and sort of crispy. They’d crackle underfoot. The walk was cold most winter days. Our cold breath made clouds, and we pretended to smoke. Sometimes the sidewalk had snow piled high on both sides. Most people shoveled the walk in front of their houses but a few didn’t. We’d stomp through the high snow. Spring was the best time. The air was sweet, flowers stated growing in the front beds of the houses lining the sidewalk and the birds sang. I wanted the walk to be longer.

I learned something new every day. I never knew what I’d see on my walk to school. I remember watching a frog jumping the tracks, and I remember a few birds’ nests on the branches of the maple trees. I saw flowers bloom and grow. It was a time of wonder.

When I was older, I forgot to notice the world around me, but that wonder returned when I was in Ghana. I found joy in everyday. I haven’t forgotten.

It is a fall day in New England. The only missing piece is a bit of a breeze to spin and twirl the fallen leaves. Right now it is 64°. The high will be 67°. It is a flannel shirt day.

When I was a kid, my parents took pleasure in duping us. They weren’t mean about it. In a way I guess it was sort of cute, to them anyway. One I remember is when my father would steal my nose. He’d show me my nose now held between his index and middle fingers. I’d panic and feel for my nose. My father always explained he just had the tip. I’d beg for my nose, and he always returned it. My mother did her Jack and Jill trick. She’d tape a small strip of paper on each index finger. One was Jack and the other Jill. She’d say, “Fly away, Jack,” and put her hand over her shoulder. She’d do same the with Jill. She’d then place both fingers back on the table, and Jack and Jill had disappeared. We’d check the floor behind her and the floor under the table. Jack and Jill were nowhere to be found. She’d have her hands behind her head and say, “Come Back, Jack. Come back, Jill.” She put the two fingers on the table and Jack and Jill had returned. It was magic. My mother always told us our tongues turned black when we lied. She’d question us under the hot lights to find the guilty party who had done something he or she shouldn’t have. We all said we didn’t do it. She’d tell us to stick out our tongues. The guilty party always refused. My mother had identified the miscreant who would run to the bathroom to check out his tongue. It was never black. My mother explained only mothers could see it. More magic.

Somethings are the reasons the air around me turns blue. When I am behind a car doing 30 or even 25 in a 40 zone, I get frustrated and wish I had a cattle catcher. Today I was in the queue on the phone. That disembodied voice told me where I was in the queue. I swear today I was 135th in line, okay maybe not but that is how it felt. That same voice kept telling me where I was in line. I’d be 330 then 250 then on and on (okay I really was 5th to start, but it didn’t feel that way). When she finally came on, her voice sounded as if she was eating the phone, but garbled voice or not, she did solve my problem.

Today Nala has a vet appointment for shots. She loves the car. I wonder if she will love the ride home today.

The sun keeps trying to break through the clouds. When it does, the leaves seem to sparkle. It will be in the mid 60’s today, a fall day. This morning I noticed the front garden. One side is summer as a couple of flowers have bloomed while the other side is fall. Some of the leaves have turned red.

I have always loved this season. When I was a kid, we’d carve pumpkins. I remember pulling the pumpkin’s guts to clear out its insides and pretending to throw the mess at my brother. I was never a talented carver. From year to year, my pumpkins always looked the same with triangular eyes and a triangular nose and a mouth with a few teeth. I guess you’d have to call him the traditional pumpkin. We’d put a candle inside, put the pumpkin on the outside stairs and light it every night. I remember the inside top always blackened.

My mother bought cardboard decorations. We’d put them on the picture window. I remember a witch on her broom, pumpkins, black cats and a skeleton with movable arms and legs. The skeleton was too long for the window so it went on an inside door. When I’d get home from school, l’d always stand outside for a bit and check out the window.

This time of year the air has a different smell. The flowers are gone. The leaves have started falling and rotting on the ground. The nights are cold. The night air is crisp. It is clear without the haze of the sun. I can hear crickets. I can hear the dogs crunching through the leaves in the yard.

This is soup weather. Chicken noodle was always my favorite. I’d crunch the Saltines and put them in the bowl of soup. The broth would disappear, absorbed by the crackers. If I buttered the crackers, the soup had an oil slick of sorts.

Because the mornings were cold, we sort of bundled, a different bundling than in winter. I’d wear a sweater under a jacket. That was enough to keep me warm.

I have started wearing a flannel shirt and socks. It is time to put summer away.

Last night it poured, and the clouds are still hanging around though the sun did break through a couple of times. It will be warm, in the low 70’s. I will be cleaning. Later I will also go to the dump, and I need a few groceries.

My muse seems to have taken a vacation. I keep writing then I delete what I wrote. Coffee has been around for close to twenty years. It started on Blogger, got kicked off then moved here to WordPress. Some of my videos do get taken down, but there no threats of WordPress kicking me to the curb. I’m going to get more coffee, the liquid sort, and hope for inspiration.

When I was a kid, my father had a savage index finger. When he reprimanded any of us, he’d use it for emphasis by pointing at us and sometimes jabbing us in the chest. Walking backwards didn’t help. He just followed. We learned the response was just to nod and agree. My sister tells the story of one summer night. Both my sisters and our cousin, who stayed with us over the summer, sneaked out to swim in the pond near our house. They got caught. My sisters went up the stairs to their bedroom first with my cousin last. My father walked behind her and jabbed her on the back with that lethal finger all the way up the stairs while reprimanding them the whole while. My sisters laughed quietly. They had planned perfectly. They knew what my father would do.

When I was a kid, I’d eat what was served because my mother never cooked foods she knew we wouldn’t eat. Beans were on the cusp. The first weird food I ate was spaghetti with clam sauce. That was at my aunt’s house. She lived in East Boston right across from the tunnel entrance. Her apartment was over my uncle’s fish market. I remember thinking the spaghetti smelled weird, and it had no red sauce or gravy as my aunt called it. Her husband was Italian, my Uncle Lorrie, and that’s what his family called it. She urged me so I tried it. It was, to my surprise, tasty. From then on, I was willing to give strange foods a taste.

Let’s see. I have eaten eel, not so strange, octopus, also not so strange, goat, a bit bony, bush meat, a rodent I learned latter was grass cutter, snake, just weird, Guinea pig, good but I couldn’t shake the feeling I was eating someone’s pet, chocolate covered grasshoppers, eaten on a dare, and a variety of odd foods in Ghana. When I travel, I eat the food of the countries I am visiting. Many times I don’t ask questions. I just eat.

The morning is dark, breezy and chilly. Rain is predicted. The dogs aren’t anxious to be out in the yard. One is upstairs on the bed, and the other is asleep on the couch. The label of dumb animals doesn’t apply here.

When I was a kid, I thought my world was huge. I could wander all over, anywhere I wanted. I had favorite places in town. I used to stop at the horse barn behind the town hall. Around the corner was the ragman’s house. Its porch was tilting from the weight of all the papers stored on it. The tracks weren’t far from there. I always thought of them as a shortcut. When I walked the tracks, I’d sometimes walk on the rail. I’d use my arms to help my balance. They didn’t help much. Usually, I wandered alone. My neighborhood friends and I walked to school together, but they weren’t roamers. I wanted to see everything.

My mother was a master at ground beef. My favorite was always her meatloaf. I also liked her ground beef in gravy over mashed potatoes. We didn’t have it often, but I liked her Chinese dinner. It was Chinese because it had water chestnuts and bean sprouts with the ground beef. She’d make it in her electric frying pan on the counter. It was topped with chow mein noodles. All we needed were chop sticks.

On cold days, my mother sometimes gave us soup in our thermoses for lunch. Mostly it was chicken noodle, the universal soup for kids. She’d include Saltines, and she always remembered to add the spoon. The rest of lunch was a half sandwich and dessert. I remember there was a skill in pouring the soup into the thermos top, into the cup. A plop of the meat meant a splash landing on the desk or sometimes on my blouse.

Today I have a concert, the second one of the week. Right now I am watching Attack of the Crab Monsters from 1957. I love these old black and white science fiction movies. In this, the navy is checking to see if radioactive dust did anything to the plants and animals. They have a surprise coming.

When I woke up, I saw a bit of blue and a glint of sunlight. When next I looked, both were gone. Clouds had filled the spaces. Clouds will be the weather today and for the next few days. We might even have some rain. The sun isn’t predicted to return until Friday. I guess we all hoped too hard when we wished for rain.

When I went to get the paper this morning, the air smelled sweet. Some flowers are still in bloom. I could hear the birds. Nobody was around, no dog walkers or carriage pushers. It was quiet.

There are so many birds in and out of the feeders they have to take a number and get in line. While my coffee was brewing, I watched from the kitchen window. I saw chickadees, nuthatches, titmice and Mrs. Cardinal. I’m glad I bought a bag of sunflower seeds yesterday. I also bought a mum and a pumpkin, ‘tis the season.

My storm doors are heavy, and it is time to haul them up from the cellar. I go slowly, step by step. The harder part is getting them in the door frames. When I was a kid, the house l lived in had wooden doors and wooden window frames. The storm windows were taken off every summer and put back in the late fall. The windows hung on hooks. When my father changed the windows, we all watched. He’d climb a tall ladder to each second floor window. He’d carry the window with him when he climbed. I remember how frustrated he’d get leaning against the house for balance while trying to hook the windows. It was an all day affair.

My play clothes this time of year were mostly flannel shirts and dungarees, girls’ dungarees with the zipper in the front pocket. I wore sneakers all year. I added socks in the fall and winter. Sometimes the socks had no elastic left at the top. They’d slide into my shoes. I walked on lumps.

When I’d get home from school, one of my favorite snacks was peanut butter or just plain butter on Saltines. Afterwards, I’d head out on my bike if the weather was pleasant enough. I never went far. The afternoons were too short.

I haven’t yet decided if I want to be busy. The house does need to be vacuumed. Henry hair is in clumps everywhere. Spiders’ webs stretch between even the smallest spaces. I saw one across the inside of a cup handle. My other option is the sloth option. I always favor that one. I’m thinking the only things I really need to do are to take a shower and go to uke practice tonight. I figure I can handle both of those.

We still have clouds. It is still in the low 60’s. It is a damp, dark morning. The weather forecast says it will be a partly cloudy day, but I think partly is a misnomer. The sky is socked in leaving no room for the sun.

Yesterday, I was so involved with bemoaning the day I missed welcoming the first day of fall, my favorite season. Today I’ll remedy that.

I noticed that some leaves on the backyard trees are turning color, a perfect welcome for fall. Some leaves are yellow. Other leaves are red. The deck is covered in yellow leaves blown by the heavy winds. The blanket of leaves in the backyard is getting taller. I can hear Nala doing her zoomies. The leaves crunch under her paws as she runs. That sound, that crunching sound of the leaves, is bright in my memory drawers and part of the melody of fall. I remember walking to school on sidewalks covered in the red leaves of the maple trees. The leaves crunched under my feet the whole walk to school.

I remember the first cold mornings of fall. The light had a shimmer to it. Everything looked brighter in the clear air. I bundled by wearing a sweater under my jacket. The day would warm as the sun rose higher.

I always think of soup this time of year. The most perfect lunch was tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. My mother would put the soup into the pan and fill the can with milk, not water, then add it to the pan. That made for the thickest, creamiest tomato soup. The cheese was always yellow American cheese. In the frying pan, the bread got deep brown and the cheese melted, even oozing a bit from the sandwich. I always dipped the sandwich into the soup. It was the perfect bite.

I have a couple of errands. I have to open a new checking account and get another ATM card so I can get some money. The dollar I have won’t go far. I can’t even buy a Snickers. I also need to stop at Agway for dry dog food, bird seed and a mum for my front steps. Today is the only open day for errands as I have a uke event every day for the rest of the week.

We’re coming into cocoa weather.

The rain has gone and left us with a damp, cloudy, chilly morning in the 60’s, but the sun might peek through later. The bird feeders need filling and the deck needs clearing. I’ll throw the fallen deck branches into the growing pile I made when I cleared the yard. The deck is covered in acorns. I was thinking maybe I’ll put a few in soil to grow my own oak trees. One can never have enough oak trees. I found a connection between eggs and acorns. If you put water into a bucket until it is about half full, you then put the eggs or the acorns into the water. Discard the ones which float.

My dance card is uke loaded this week. I have practice, a lesson and four concerts, including one on Saturday. I don’t know where I can fit in an afternoon nap.

I’ve always thought of Sunday as a wasted day. When I was a kid, every Sunday morning, I begrudgingly dressed in my church clothes, a skirt and a blouse, and usually walked to mass, the same walk I always took to school. The upstairs of the church is sort of grand. It has a vaulted ceiling, old wooden pews, and when I was a kid, a huge altar by the back wall. I remember the altar boys would go behind the altar and bring out stuff like cruets needed for mass. I wondered if there was a room or just shelves behind it. I never checked. A small altar is on each side of the big altar. I remember one early, dark Christmas morning when the mass was at a side altar. Five or six old ladies and my brother and I were the only people at that mass. In the annals of my mass going, it was my favorite mass, the perfect mass, short with no sermon and no collection. There wasn’t even an altar boy.

At every wedding and funeral in my church, a man called Chewy was in attendance. He probably didn’t know who died or who was getting married, but no one minded him being there. Everyone knew Chewy. My father always stopped to shake his hand and say hi. Chewy was intellectually disabled, what was referred to as retarded back then, but it wasn’t cruelly used to describe Chewy. It was just the language of the times. I remember Chewy usually wore a grey jacket and khaki pants. He waved at the people in the cars passing by the church. I didn’t know anything about Chewy, even his real name. I don’t know how long he was the official greeter.

The rain started yesterday, and it is still raining. It is a heavy rain. I can hear it plinking on the dogs’ outside metal bowl and pounding on the roof and windows. The dogs went out then immediately turned around to come back inside. They are now napping away their trauma. The house is chilly, sweatshirt and socks chilly. It is a perfect day to nestle under a blanket, drink coffee and read.

When I was a kid, today would have been the greatest disappointment. I’d have been stuck with no adventures, with being house bound. My bike would have stayed in the cellar. I’d wind up reading in my room, my refuge, and, in the afternoon, watching Creature Double Feature, the only redeeming piece of the day. Saturday supper was universal, the same all over, hot dogs, beans and brown bread. The hot dogs, covered in mustard and piccalilli, were in a toasted roll. I never ate the beans. I did eat the brown bread slathered in butter. It was the only bread I ever ate which came from a can. I bought a can of it recently. I didn’t like it. I was a little bit sad.

When I was growing up, my town had some factories. I remember the box factory by the railroad tracks. Once in a while, I’d see mostly men sitting outside on the steps smoking. Across from Farm Hill was a chemical factory which I remember and later a pharmaceutical factory, E.L. Patch. I only know about the Patch factory as I have an old postcard of the building. I don’t remember it. The building was beside a different part of the tracks than the box factory. When the trains still ran, I remember seeing train cars parked beside the building. Stoneham was a shoe town. The town seal even has a high top shoe on it. A shoe factory was right below uptown and was still operating when I was a kid, but not anymore. Now it houses condominiums.

I seldom go back to my town, but when I do, I take a nostalgia ride. I ride through the streets which were my walk home from school. I pass the house in the project where we lived before we moved to the cape. I drive by my grammar school, the park where I used to ice skate, the zoo, what once was the dairy farm and through all the other familiar streets which were so important in my life. Sights and sounds jump out of my memory drawers. Time stops, and it is almost as if I were there, and I’m young again.

Last night the rain started. It is now a mighty storm with heavy winds. I saw branches on my deck and a spawn at the feeders. I’ll go out later to clear the deck and throw acorns at the spawn. I do wish I had a sling shot.

This is a busy week. Besides practice and a lesson, I have four uke concerts so I am going to adopt my sloth like persona until Tuesday, practice day.

Yesterday I had my four shots, two in each arm. The Covid hurt going down into my arm but was the only one which did. This morning my arm, the one subjected to RSV and the shingles shot, is sore. I did wake up with a horrifically painful back, the old question mark look, but I blame the dogs.

I have told this story before, but I was reminded of it yesterday. We, the Peace Corps trainees heading to Ghana, got a yellow fever shot before we left the US. In Ghana, the second day was shot day. We got shots protecting us from everything except Black Death. The table was long and L shaped. We got in line and moved from shot to shot. We chatted while waiting, but most of us were a bit nervous, and the laughs were forced. We didn’t know what we were getting so we asked at each stop. We got typhoid, parathyroid, diphtheria and the most painful shot of all, rabies. The guy in front of me barely flinched with each shot. At one stop his knees buckled. That was the rabies stop. I said I didn’t want it. I got it. My knees buckled from the pain. The guy behind said he didn’t want. He got it. We moved on to polio vaccine and gamma globulin against hepatitis, a shot we got every six months. That last one was given in a private room as it was a butt shot. We started taking Aralen, pills we had to take every week, to protect us from malaria. The next day many of us were sick. Red lines were moving up and down my arm. I also had a fever. I napped a lot.

We were given a medical case with pills we might need, bandages, salves to ward off infection and other stuff I don’t remember. We got a booklet explaining everything in the case and their uses. My favorite lines in the whole booklet were what to do if we got bitten by a dog. We should cut off the dog’s heads, put it on ice and carry it to Accra. That meant I’d have the dog’s head with me on a bus for about twelve hours. I didn’t even want to contemplate what that ride would be like.

I was pretty healthy for those 2 years. I never got bitten by a dog, and I didn’t get Black Death.