Mother Nature toys with us. The sky is cloudy for a while, filled with white clouds which carry no rain, then the sun appears. I hold off my cheers. I know better. Sure enough, the clouds return while the sun waits in the wings, but she will soon take another turn and reappear. Right now it is 79°.

I have a few chores today. The dog fur tumbleweeds are back or maybe they never left. They are everywhere downstairs. I could make a black and white science fiction movie with the tumbleweeds having teeth and chasing me down the hall to attack. I can imagine them chomping at my heels.

This morning I grocery shopped. It will be delivered this afternoon. I did forget a few things, but they are extras not usually on my list. Plantains and strawberries came to mind later.

When I was a kid, I loved watermelon on a hot day. My father would cut it into slices. When I was really young, the juice often ran down my arms. It made red lines. My sister wondered why we don’t have watermelon everywhere. We all spit out the seeds. Sometimes it was a contest to see who could spit the furthest. I never won. It was the same with cherry pits. I also never won those contests either.

When I was a teacher, I used to travel every summer. Mostly I went to Europe. I’d be gone five or six weeks. I always ended my trips with a few days in London. I’d stay mostly in hostels. I traveled on the cheap. I carried a Let’s Go Europe book with all the ways to save money like having a drink at a bar with free food. I’d buy bread and tomatoes and cold cuts to make sandwiches. I bought mustard paste and kept it in my backpack. I stayed at the former Olympic dorms in Helsinki. In other places I stayed in university housing as students were gone for the holidays. I never stayed in a hotel. I took trains and busses at night and slept and saved a little money. Usually I even came home with a little money left over.

Now, of course, when I travel, I don’t backpack, and I stay in hotels. I eat in restaurants. I rent a car. I live the good life.

Today is an unpleasant day, cloudy with rain expected and chilly at 65°. The roads will be filled with tourists hoping to find diversions. Route 28 will be the most heavily trafficked with slow cars and their gawkers. The parking lots at movie theaters will be filled beyond capacity so cars will haphazardly park on the grass. Such is Cape Cod on a chilly, cloudy summer day.

I sometimes wonder about food, strange foods, at least to me. Did every explorer have a food taster? I remember once when my brother ate some red berries and had to have his stomach pumped. I wonder about the artichoke. Who tried first and how many attempts before it was edible as not only is it ugly but also cooking and eating it is complicated. It seems most cultures have traditional foods we might not eat. In Ghana, chicken feet were boiled then eaten. They became gelatinous, and I thought they were gross to look at let alone eat. Insects are eaten all over the world. I have never been tempted to eat a spider, a grub or even locusts. As a joke one year I bought lollipops from Mexico with worms inside. Nobody tried them. They got tossed. I did try frog legs, and they weren’t bad. They were actually tasty. My mother could never watch my dad, my sister and me eat steamed clams. They grossed her out.

I have found that asking questions is sometimes the wrong approach in identifying unknown foods. It was in Ghana where I learned that and where my culinary experiences began. The one food I should never have questioned there was bush meat. I should have just been content to wrap pieces in bread and eat them. I found out it was grasscutter, a bush rat, a rodent. Had I not already eaten it, I would have been grossed by it being a rodent of sorts; instead, I kept eating it anyway.

When I first visited my sister in Colorado, I ate Rocky Mountain oysters which are not oysters. They are bull testicles battered in flour and deep fried. Even now, decades later, my stomach turns a bit at the thought of them.