The morning is ugly: breezy, damp and cloudy. Sporadic rain is predicted. The weather lends itself to laziness.

When I was a kid, rainy summer days never stopped me. I loved running in the rain, kicking up the water in the gutter beside the sidewalk and even riding my bike through big puddles to make waves of water shoot into the air. I’d raise my feet off the pedals as the water sprayed on each side of my bike. It was a bicycle parting of water, on the small side of the Red Sea. I got wet, but I never minded. My clothes dried quickly, my sneakers not so quickly.

When I was in Ghana, during my live-in, I used to walk to the compound where my host father’s wives and their babies and small children lived. The compound was enclosed but had an open space in the middle and small connected rooms with curtained doors all around the open space. We’d greet each other, our only conversation. I’d sit and watch meals being made, fufu being pounded and toddlers stumbling around the center concrete yard. If they got near me, they’d cry because I was white, the first white person they’d ever seen. What astonished me was that often a vulture would fly into the compound and walk around as if it owned the place. Nobody but me noticed. I loved seeing a vulture so up-close instead of in a movie circling a dead body. They were big ugly birds. I always thought of our sort of meeting as a strange encounter, one I’d never have imagined.

On a trip to Scotland, I traveled to Inverness and went to see Loch Ness. I wandered around. It was a huge loch. As I wondered, I kept my eyes on the water hoping to see Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, a crypdid. I wanted Nessie to be real.

My dance card this week has few entries, just uke. My social events are sparse, but I hope to add a few Saturday movie nights on the deck, but the nights need to be warmer. I’m hankering to entertain.

The morning is lovely. It is in the high 60’s and mostly sunny. The small breeze is just perfect. I slept in this morning. Both dogs were asleep, curled beside each other on the bed. It was after 10 before we all woke up. They knew when I woke up. Henry jumped off while Nala stretched.

I remember the house in Maine where we spent our family vacation one summer. Three memories are the strongest. My father bought lobsters one night for dinner for my mother and him. He put them on the floor, and they walked, maybe even ran, backwards. Duke, our dog, bent down to look and then kept barking. The lobsters scurried faster. My father then picked them up to save them from the dog though not from the pot.

Off the kitchen was a tiny room. A bookcase was under the window, and a couple of rocking chairs with small cloth covered pads on the seat and back were by the bookcase. I checked out the books, always glad for books. One I had never seen before. It was A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. The poems were different than any I had ever read. They were as if a child, like me, had written them. The poems told of fairies, of climbing trees, of far off places and of dreaming. I became a lover of poetry.

One rainy day, the house was noisy. I took my book and went to the car and got comfy lying down on the back seat. The rain pattered the car’s roof and dripped down the windows. I was safe and dry. I fell asleep lulled by the rain.

I have other memories of that vacation, smaller memories, like listening to Sergeant Preston of the Yukon on the radio, the sick field mouse in the yard, the small pier where the row boat was tied and the cold, cold Maine water.