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.

Today is the second delightful day in a row. Last night was even chilly, yup chilly. I had to shut the window and put on socks. I even snuggled under the blanket on my bed and easily fell asleep. This morning is in the 60’s. Today’s high will be 70°. It’s a beautiful morning, sunny with only a few clouds to break the monotony. A few leaves are blowing.

When I was a kid, jumping over the sprinkler was one way to cool down. The metal sprinkler had arms and turned in a circle. We’d adjust the height of the water for the perfect jump until the water was not too high or not too low, sort of Goldilock’s moments but without the bears. The sprinkler was always on the grass by the side of the house. We’d spread towels in the sun as if we were on the beach. The water was always cold at first. When the grass got really wet, we’d sometimes slide and leave trails in the wet grass. My father was never pleased. He was a grass man.

I remember my father switching from storm windows to screens. He had to borrow a ladder so he could get to the second floor windows. That was always scary for us to watch as my father and ladders had a lamentable history. The storm windows hooked at the top. He had to pull the windows up off the hooks with both hands while he leaned into the ladder so he wouldn’t fall. After he got the windows off the hooks, he’d carry each one down the ladder with one hand holding the window and the other hand holding the side of the ladder. I still, to this day, wonder how he managed all those windows every year without falling. I swear the guy who invented the combo storm and screen windows knew my father.

This has been a busy week for me, but I missed the concert Wednesday as the string of my uke broke when I was tuning. I left to have it strung. The stringer wasn’t there so I had to go to the master of all, YouTube, to learn how to string it. I succeeded. I can now add stringing a uke to my resume.