The sound of a blower woke me up. It was my landscaping crew. They blew all the leaves and sticks into a pile in the front yard then cleared the piles. In the back, they took my Christmas tree, my long dead Christmas tree, collected branches and blew the deck and driveway clean. Henry barked the whole time.

Nala stole an empty dog food can from the trash and took it outside. She carried it everywhere, and when she realized I didn’t care, she brought it inside. When I was with Jack, she brought it upstairs. It was on my bed. I took it and tossed it. She didn’t notice.

My mother used to keep a jigsaw puzzle on the dining room table. Anyone who walked by couldn’t resist trying to find where one of the pieces belonged. Sometimes when my mother visited, we’d do a puzzle together. I’d make her a drink and put out some snacks. We’d sit by the table, chat and find the edges first then the spots for the rest of the pieces. I loved those evenings.

Today is one ugly day. It is dark. The sky is covered in clouds. Rain is predicted for later. I’ll be staying dry close to hearth and home.

When I was a kid, ugly days meant nothing as long as they were dry. A Saturday was not a day to waste in my world, in my town. It was the perfect day to explore. I knew all the corners, all the streets and all the stores. Most times I went alone on my bike and sometimes on foot. If the movie was good, I’d go to the matinee. Other times I’d wander around uptown on my way to somewhere else. I remember the smell of popcorn cooking at the candy maker’s behind the square. I knew when Hank’s was baking bread. As I neared the fish market, the last of the stores, I could smell fish, an unpleasant smell of fish that seems to hang in the air of every fish market. In my memory drawers, all those stores still live. I swear I can smell the bread baking.

Today is cloudy and cooler than I expected. The prediction is for sun, but nobody told the sun. The wind is only now and then but still strong enough to whip the tall branches. I have a short to-do list. The big item on the list is buying canned dog food and dog treats. I also need to vacuum the hall littered with pieces of bark from the pine tree twig Nala brought inside this morning.

Not much is happening around here. It is quiet on my street. Not even a dog is barking, not even Henry who is having his morning nap upstairs on my bed. Nala is here on the couch.

I didn’t have deck movies last summer, but I’m ready for this summer. I bought a few black and white science fiction movies from the 50’s and a couple of classics, including Gunga Din and Casablanca. I have three choices for July 4th: 1776, Independence Day and, my favorite, Jaws. The ballots will go out in the mail.

When I was a kid, just before the end of the school bell rang, we’d put our books away then stand by the door in twos to go out. The nuns seemed to be enamored with twos. We walked into school in the morning in twos. We walked in after recess in twos, and we walked out at the end of the day in twos. The only exception to the rule of two was when we waited in a single line for our turns in the bathroom.

I have some Peeps. I opened the packages and put the yellow chicks in the kitchen bookcase so the air will harden them. They need to be so hard they don’t mush but rather make a banging noise on a hard surface. My love for hard Peeps started when I was in Ghana. My mother sent a package for Easter. It took two or three months to get to me. By then the Peeps were almost as hard as a rock. They made my teeth work. They still make my teeth work. I just have to practice patience.

Spring is opening gloriously. The sky is a cerulean blue, an old Crayola color. The sun is bright but not as warm as I’d like. It is only 44°. The wind is strong enough to toss from side to side the highest branches of the tallest pines. The dogs stay out longer. Nala finds the warmest part of the yard and lies in the sun. Henry wanders around then comes back inside to nap. He likes my bed better than the couch.

I remember the unfolding of spring when I was a kid. The trees shading the sidewalk on my walk to school had small buds. The air had a sweetness. The sunlight was brighter and warmer. I could finally shed my outer coat. The afternoons were longer. The streetlights came on later. Only the nights were still cold, winter cold. The blankets stayed on the beds.

I am not a fan of spaghetti. I prefer any other shape. The sauce, or as my aunt used to call it, the gravy, is best with sausage and even pork. I’m okay with clam sauce. Meatballs are my least favorite. Pasta always tastes better on the second day. Italian bread is a must, especially crispy garlic bread. A chunk of romano or parmesan is best for grating on top of the pasta. I learned that at my grandmother’s house where she always had a huge pot of spaghetti warming on the stove on Sundays when the family descended upon her, my aunts and uncles and the cast of thousands of cousins. The chunk of cheese and the big grater were on the table. It was easy to grate so much cheese the spaghetti was hidden.

This is a quieter week than last week. I have my usual uke events, practice and a lesson, and we do have one concert, but nothing else is on my dance card. I can be a sloth the rest of the time. I am good at sloth!

The morning is lovely. Out my den window I can see a brilliant sun, a brighter sun than we’ve seen, and a cloudless blue sky. What I can’t see is the cold. It is only 36°. I gasped a little when I went to get the papers.

When I was a kid, winter was fun. Snow was fun. I never really noticed how cold it was even when my lips turned blue. I hated wearing a hat, but I didn’t mind mittens. My mother made me layer. On the first warmish day I’d beg to wear lighter clothes. That never worked. She always made me layer anyway.

I had a bit of a scare this morning, thanks to Miss Nala, not a surprise I suspect. I hadn’t seen Nala in a while. She wasn’t on the couch, her usual morning nap spot, so I went outside to check the yard. No Nala lying in the sun. That scared me even though I knew she couldn’t escape the yard. I called and called. My voice got panicky. I came inside to check upstairs. Right away I noticed the gate across Jack’s door was leaning in the doorway. Nala was inside the room. She got in, but she couldn’t get out. Nabbed! She had eaten Jack’s food, licked the empty cans clean and left a trash mess for me.

The dogs are conspiring against me. I found both sets of name plates and town licenses on the floor the same day. Coincidence? I think not.

My father used to love the dump. My friends would come down for the weekend, and he’d take them there as if it were part of a tour of Cape Cod. My father pointed out the highlights like the seagulls circling the high piles of trash and other gulls at the top of the trash mountains picking out morsels. The dump was noisy back then. Gulls cried and squealed from overhead. It was a spectacle. My father would hate the dump now with its recycle bins and trash bins. There are no seagulls.

Today is my dump day.

The sky is beginning to have spots of blue, and I can see a bit of sunlight. It will be warm, as high as 50°, but the ever-present wind, blowing the highest pine branches left and right then back again, makes it feel colder. I have white lights to hang on the deck rail so that will be my fresh air for the day.

When I was a kid, we always had St. Patrick’s Day off from school because that was the name of my parish, my church and school. Mostly I did Saturday sorts of thing like riding my bike or walking uptown to the library. I wore green in honor of the day. My mother didn’t make corned beef and cabbage as she knew we’d grimace and groan about all the vegetables. Cabbage smelled bad. The only parts of the meal we would have eaten were the meat and potatoes. That all changed when we were older.

My father loved a boiled dinner, a traditional New England name for corned beef and cabbage, any time of year. I remember the giant pot on the stove, and my father filling his dish more than once from the pot. When I was there one St. Patrick’s Day with my dog Shauna, my first boxer, my father gave her a plate filled with everything but the cabbage and onions. She ate on the floor, and he sat in his usual spot on the couch. They both had ice cream for dessert. One St. Patrick’s Day, my father hunted in the pot for the potatoes. He found none, at least none left. They had disintegrated. My father’s disappointment was so keen I could see it in face and in the way he walked back to the living room. My mother didn’t know what to say. Comfort would only have come from potatoes.

When I marched with St. Patrick’s Shamrocks, a drill team or rather the drill team, we marched in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston a few times. I remember one really cold day. I also remember some spectators trying to join us in the march. They had been imbibing in some local establishments. They kindly offered us a wee taste before they were shooed away.

Today I will celebrate St.Patrick’s Day by wearing green and dining on corned beef and cabbage. It will have potatoes, and I will not share with the dogs.

The rain started late last night. By 2, the wind was fierce and loud. This morning I found part of my front fence down. It has some rot anyway, but the wind helped it along. I lifted it and reconnected as best I could. I’ll have to call my factotum. Right now it is warm at 44° and foggy. The rain stopped a bit earlier and probably will not be back until much later if at all. My sister who lives north of Boston had rain now turned to snow.

Today is a perfect day for movies, black and white science fiction movies. Right now it is Stranger from Venus from 1954 starring Patricia Neal.

When I was a kid, I had only a couple of pairs of shoes. That seems to have been all I needed. My school shoes doubled as my church shoes. The rest of the time I wore sneakers. I remember the toes of my sneakers were sort of pointed. The sneakers were white and usually dirty. I did have snow boots that went over my shoes but not without a huge struggle. My solution was to pull my feet out of the boots first then pull my shoes out. I did the reverse going home.

In elementary school I got graded for silent reading. I always did well, always A’s. I never thought about how that grade came to be. Later I figured if I had moved my lips or had moved my head from line to line I’d have done poorly.

I remember the warm-up writing exercises for Palmer Method: the circles, the loops and the straight up and down lines. My circles were closer to squares. Sometimes I smeared my lines. The ribbon for Palmer Method always remained elusive.

In the seventh grade I was told a long held life fact. It was a non-nun year so I had a teacher. She was oldish, at least in my eyes. I remember trying to get one of the basketball hoops in the school yard for girls to use during recess. Many of us played CYO basketball for the parish so it made sense. That teacher told me no and wondered if I had my friend, a euphemism for getting my period, yet. I didn’t, but I also didn’t understand why that precluded us from playing basketball and told her so. She said once I got it I would understand. I never did.

The morning is cloudy. Despite the wind advisory, there is no wind. It is 41°, about the usual most days now. Rain is predicted for tonight into tomorrow.

On rainy days when I was a kid, my classroom was dark, despite the lights. I found the darkness comforting in an odd way. I could hear rain drops hitting the windows and the shuffling of papers and books as we moved from lesson to lesson. Sometimes the rain was louder than the nun so we read quietly. Our literature books were thick with stories. Questions were at the ends of each story. They kept us quiet and busy. We left our desks to go downstairs to the bathrooms, and at lunch we could move around the room, but we always missed the freedom of recess.

Summer rain has always been my favorite. When I was a kid, I loved it when the water flowed like a river where the sidewalk meets the road. We’d kick and splash our way down the street through the gutter. When I saw the movie It, the drain scene between Georgie and Pennywise reminded me of those days of splashing down the gutter to the drain, but we didn’t see a single clown.

In Ghana, life seldom slowed down in the rain though sometimes it paused a little when the rain was the heaviest. I needed rainy day back up lessons because the rain on the tin roofs made hearing anything but the raindrops impossible. Mostly my students read or wrote an essay, harkening back to my own school days.

I loved the sound of the rain pelting the tin roofs in my classrooms and at home. I was surrounded by rain without getting wet. On one of my visits back to Ghana, I got caught in heavy rain so I stood under the roof overhang of a small seamstress shop near the market. Once they saw me standing there, I was invited to sit inside the small shop. A chair was provided, and I sat and watched the women cut and sew. We smiled and nodded at each other, about the only way we could communicate. I didn’t know FraFra, and the ladies knew little English. Their kindness kept me dry.