Last night it rained, a heavy rain, but now it is cloudy but dry. A strong wind is blowing even the heaviest top branches of the backyard trees and making it feel colder than it is. I have to go out for a bit. That seems to happen about every day. I’m missing my hibernation.

Tuesday night, when I was driving home from uke practice, the fog was heavy in places, especially in the low parts of the road. There were few cars. On Wednesday morning the fog was so thick it hid the ocean. I loved that ride.

When I was a kid, school days were all the same. My mother woke us up. She always made breakfast. Soft boiled eggs were my favorite. We had yellow chick egg holders from Fanny Farmer. When I bought my house, my mother brought down a few, two of which are missing beaks, but that doesn’t matter. They have a prominent place in my kitchen. She always took off the top of the egg shell and cut the toast into strips for egg dunking. I drank cocoa with my breakfast. After eating, I got dressed for school. I never had to decide what to wear. It was always a white blouse, blue skirt and a cowboy bow tie. I walked to school with my friend, waited in the schoolyard for the bell to ring, went inside, left my coat in the cloak room and then took my seat at my desk. The school day had officially begun. It seldom held any surprises.

We had a TV just about my whole life. We’d watch it starting in the late afternoon. My mother would be in the kitchen making dinner. I have in my mind’s eye, in my memory drawers, exactly what the kitchens of my childhood looked like. My mother is always part of that memory. Sometimes she is standing at the sink and other times at the stove. Potatoes are aways cooking. I still remember the pan she used. The windows of the small kitchens always misted over from the heat of the oven. The house always felt its coziest then.

Today’s weather is yesterday and the days before yesterday. It is warm, in the high 40’s, and rain has started and stopped and is predicted to start again. The air is still, not even the dead leaves are moving.

I found more hope of spring in the front garden. The croci leaves are poking out of the ground. The dafs are taller and their buds are getting more pronounced.

Even though the sloth in me is strong the dust is driving me crazy. I did get one room cleaned yesterday and will do another today. My dance card for the week is pretty empty, just uke practice, my uke lesson and a doctor’s appointment, a regular check up. I do have a Wednesday dump run scheduled.

Henry has been brave. Yesterday, he was on the side of the couch where he never is. The last few nights he has been sleeping beside me at the top of the bed. Nala has been sleeping in Henry’s regular spot at the foot of the bed. Henry tore open a trash bag yesterday. Only Nala has been notorious for doing that. He also chewed a few paper plates. Nala watched the clean-up. I’m thinking they’re perfect for a role reversal Disney sort of cartoon.

Being a kid was easy for me. I had all the kid stuff like a bike, roller skates and ice skates. I had lots of board games and books. Other than school, I had no responsibilities. I had lots of time to do what I wanted. I roamed. My bike gave me freedom to ride to far flung places like other towns and once to East Boston. I became a traveler.

I was so excited when I voted for the first time. It was for the 1968 presidential election between Humphrey and Nixon. I voted for Humphrey. Nothing would have enticed me to vote for Nixon. My candidate lost. I was disappointed. When I was in the Peace Corps, I voted by mail. The ballots came late, but I voted anyway. For today’s primary I also voted by mail. I’ve been doing that since the pandemic. I am still excited to vote.

If this were Ghana, I’d think we were in the middle of the rainy season. The sun hasn’t been around in a while. The air stays damp and the sky stays cloudy. Rain is predicted starting on Wednesday.

I was six when I learned to tie my shoes. My very patient mother taught me before I started school because other than my winter boots, all my shoes were tie shoes. I was learning an essential task. Tying the bow was easy. Tightening the loops was not.

I learned to tell time when I was seven. My first watch was a Cinderella watch my aunt gave me for my First Communion. Cinderella was wearing her blue gown.

I knew the value of a penny, and it had value when I was a kid, and I knew nickels and dimes. A dollar seemed like immense wealth. I learned to count money in the first grade. We had arithmetic work sheets with pictures of coins. We had to add and subtract the coins. I learned things like two dimes and a nickel equal a quarter.

I never saw a bike with training wheels. We all got two wheelers with backpedal brakes. Learning to balance was the key. On my first attempts, my bike would lean to one side or the other, but my mother was there to keep it and me from falling. She’d hold the bike and keep it straight. She’d tell me to pedal and keep pedaling. She didn’t let go until she was sure I’d gotten the whole balance thing. I remember how excited I was that I had learned to ride a bike.

When I was young, my mother or father cut my meat. I tried, but I couldn’t quite figure out the right way to hold the knife. The fork part was easy. My first few solo attempts resulted in shredded meat, but it still tasted the same, finely cut or shredded.

I think I learned to roller skate first before learning to ice skate. Four wheels were far easier than a single blade.

Being a kid was filled with learning new things, but learning doesn’t really ever stop. I still love to try new things. Look at me and my uke.

Today is warm but ugly. Yesterday’s rain left a damp, cloudy day. I’m going nowhere. Today is a good nap day. The dump can wait until Wednesday.

This is a quiet week for me. My dance card is pretty empty. I have my usual Tuesday and Wednesday uke practice and lesson, and I don’t have any concerts. The next one is at the mall on Sunday. We’re doing the Irish book. I will be clad accordingly.

I am a sloth today. I have no ambition. The dust balls can grow to huge proportions, black and white science fiction monster proportions. I’ll arm myself with my hand vacuum just in case!

When I was a kid, we had a TV console. It was big and wooden. The TV was hidden behind a couple of doors. Its screen was small. We always sat close risking permanent blindness.

The skates I had when I was a kid were one size fits all. You could pull the skate in the middle to fit your shoe length. A key tightened the grips on the top sides of the skates. I always kept my roller skate key on a string around my neck though sometimes I’d tie the ends of a shoelace together and use that to hold my key. Sneakers were never good for roller skating. I couldn’t tighten the grips enough. My skates had leather straps which went across the tops of my feet. They always held. The grips didn’t. Sometimes my foot would come loose, and the skate would dangle by the strap until I stopped to tighten the grip again. If you ever lost your skate key, it was the end of skating.

I loved the sound of the skates rolling on the sidewalks and the tingle on the bottom of my feet. One sidewalk beside my house was a hill which had road on one side and grass on the other. It was steep. It wasn’t for the fainthearted.

Rain is coming, of course it is on this warm day, a day in the 50’s. I went out on the deck and was appalled by my yard. Trash, stolen by Nala, was mostly chewed into pieces, except for the paper plates. They looked like flying saucers in a B science fiction movie. A bag of cans had opened, and Coke cans were strewn about the yard. I imagined a crowd of my neighbors carry flaming torches and demanding I clean the yard. I did so the yard is now presentable, and the crazed crowd has dispersed. Pine branches are all that are left. They need a chipper.

When I think back to grammar school, a few nuns and teachers come to mind. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Kerrigan, could have been the poster woman for teachers in the 1950’s. She had white hair in a bun and always wore a flowered dress and clunky black laced shoes. She stooped a little. She was soft spoken. In the third grade I had the nun who told me not to sing during the May procession. She took some joy away. Miss Konopacka in the fourth grade was stern. She had gone to school with my aunt. I didn’t mind her but my sisters hated her. Sister Eileen Marie in the fifth grade was huge. She mostly sat at her desk. She gave candy as rewards for answering questions. She had favorites. I wasn’t one of them. Miss Quilter in the sixth grade was my favorite. She gave me a love of learning. She gave me a sense of curiosity about words and language. Sister Hildegard, in the eighth grade, had already gone past her use-by date. I’ll never forget that year. I was a favorite and got away with everything. I left school, with permission from her, and sometimes never went back. I hid my brown lunch bag and went out for lunch. Many times I arrived back late from lunch. She never cared. She didn’t even like us.

Today I have to clean downstairs. The dust balls whirl into the air when I walk down the hall. I could write clean me on the table dust. On my dance card, besides uke, I only have my dump run. That’s for tomorrow. I can hardly wait says I tongue in cheek.

I am running out of time. I have a concert today, and I have to leave in ten minutes. I, of course, was up until nearly morning today so I slept late.

It is the first of our St Patrick’s Day music so I am decked in green. Luckily I brought it all out last night. My fascinator has sparkly shamrocks that wiggle when I move my head. My green sweatshirt has Ryan in the middle with a harp in the background. Even my socks are decked in shamrocks.

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig ort!

Winter is reminding us that a few warm days does not a spring make. Last night it poured again. The wind blew strong, and it was downright cold. The rain has since stopped, but the wind and the cold remain. It is in the mid 30’s. The blue sky is disappearing and being replaced by light grey clouds, but no rain is predicted until the weekend.

Today is fill the larder day. My fridge and cabinets are empty, and all three pets need food. I have a shopping list. Most items are essentials, but I’m in the mood to add Snickers to the list. Come to think of it, I am always in the mood for a Snickers.

When I think back to when I was a kid, I am amazed at what I would and wouldn’t eat. Beans, of course, were on the never eat list. The sizes of Lima and kidney beans were appalling. I would eat sardines which amazes me now. I didn’t eat a whole lot of vegetables except for potatoes and the carrots my mother hid in the mashed potatoes. I did eat peas and corn. I didn’t even know what cauliflower and broccoli looked like until I was older. I’m still not a fan though I will eat fresh broccoli with a dip. I’m thinking the dip hides the taste and makes the broccoli palatable. I ate oatmeal, the sort you make on the stove, the sort which had lumps no matter how much you tried to stir them away. I have never liked pancakes, even pancakes drowning in maple syrup and a bit of butter. White bread was king, but I also ate Italian bread, scali bread from the bakery.

My taste in foods changed as I got older. It widened even more when I started to travel. Each trip was an adventure in eating. In Ghana, I ate Ghanaian food, but I also ate Lebanese food and Indian food for the first time. I ate Guinea pig in South America, goat, snake, bush meat aka rodent in Ghana, and some meats I still can’t identify. I figure sometimes you are better off not knowing.

Today is a day to be out and about. It has bit of spring about it at 54°. Green shoots have appeared in my front garden. They will be yellow daffodils.

Nala was out for a while so I went to check. I know she didn’t get out of the yard, but memories of Gracie always get me to check. Nala is lying on her favorite spot, a patch of grass in the sun.

My house is celebrating spider season. I saw the biggest spider this morning. It was walking by the butcher block on its way to a chair rung. I don’t know the sort of spider it was, but when I was a kid, we used to call it a daddy long-legs. I watched it.

When I was a kid, we lived in a project. It wasn’t what you’d imagine a project looks like. The houses were duplexes. They all had small front beds for flowers and small grassy lawns. The backyard was shared. My house sat on the corner on a hill. The front of my house was a bit different than the front of the other houses because of that hill. We not only had a grassy lawn on the front and side of the house, but we also had a grassy hill down to the street. The front walk led to some steps which went down to the sidewalk. My father parked right by those steps.

Everywhere near the project where we roamed is gone now. Even when I lived there they started replacing the field and the swamp with brick houses containing small apartments for the elderly. My father used to call it wrinkle city. His mother lived in one ground floor apartment in a building where the woods used to be. Every time I was cajoled to go with him to visit her I’d remember how it used to be.

Today was supposed to be balmy, but the wind is strong so the morning is chilly. Rain is predicted.

My mother could sew. She made my senior prom dress, and it was beautiful. I can still see the pattern spread out on the living floor and my mother kneeling beside it to cut and pin the cloth to the pattern. She was nervous about it. She had never sewed anything as big as a dress. I remember that prom. During the late morning I went to the hairdresser. Most of the girls did back then. I got one of those tall dos with bit of a flip. My long time friend came down on the bus to be my date. During the afternoon it started to rain and the rain continued. We went with another couple. The prom was at the Chatham Bars Inn, a beautiful spot right across the street from the ocean. I carried a coat over my head in the rain to protect my hair and dress. The closest entrance from the car to the Inn was through the kitchen so we walked through it to the prom room which was beautiful. We had our pictures taken, we ate and we danced. It was the perfect evening. After the prom, we changed our clothes then headed to a friend’s house for an after party. We had a scavenger hunt. I remember some of it. One clue was in a cemetery. Another was we had to stop at the school principal’s house to find out his middle name. I still remember it was Adolph. That prom was 59 years ago.

I can’t sew so I tend to staple. I can cook. When I have company, I try new dishes, but I have favorite old dishes. Chicken curry is one of them. The first time I ate it was in Ghana at the house of a Moroccan doctor and his wife. It was so delicious with all the toppings that it quickly became a favorite. I remember the first time I cooked it myself. I invited friends, skeptical friends. I had toppings to soften the curry heat, toppings likes apples, pineapple, cashews and raisins. One of my guests took only a tiny amount of everything. After he tasted it, he went back and piled the chicken and covered it will all the toppings. He was my barometer of success.