Last night I could hear the rain on the roof. It was such a heavy rain the dogs chose not to go outside before bed. The morning is gray and damp. Scattered rain is predicted. It will be warm if the wind stays away.

I have a to-do list. The paper has yellowed. The list never gets shorter. I sigh and swear I’ll get busy. I do that every day.

I grew up playing board and card games. We’d sit at the kitchen table to play. Every Christmas we’d get a new game. We started with Candy Land, Shutes and Ladders and Go to the Head of the Class. We worked up to Sorry and Monopoly. I loved Sorry but not Monopoly. It was too long and boring. 

My parents taught me to play dominoes. I didn’t even know it was a game. I just thought you built with the tiles. I didn’t question the pips. We always played double sixes. Much later I bought double nines to try, but I didn’t like it, too many pips to plan ahead. I taught some friends to play dominos. They thought you just built with them.

We learned card games and played Go Fish and Steal the Old Man’s Pack. Go Fish demanded trust, but sometimes I doubted the go fish from my opponent thinking he had my card in his hand. I wasn’t always wrong. We used to play Pokeno on Friday nights. It is sort of a bingo game but, instead of the letters, the boards have cards you cover. My mother kept a huge jar of pennies. We had to buy the pennies. I hated to lose.

One of our adult card games was Hi-Low Jack aka Pitch. You bid for the hand, how many points, tricks, you’ll take. If you win the hand, you call trump, no not that one!!! You get all sorts of points for all sort of cards. My father was a rabid Hi-Low Jack fan. One of the joys of playing the game was beating him. If we did, we na na’ed to make it worse. One time my father’s card, his ace, got trumped, no not that one. He screamed. He fell off the bench in the kitchen, but even lying on the floor didn’t stop him. He kept playing. We couldn’t stop laughing. Life with my father was never dull.

The sun, the blue sky and a temperature in the 40’s beckon me outside to work today. Let the inside dust sit and grow. The bird feeders need filling and the backyard needs clearing. Pine branches blown down by the wind litter the backyard. 

I went to the parish grammar school for eight years, no kindergarten back then. There were so many of us we had two different classrooms for each grade, and those classes were filled, forty or more in each room. The rows of desks stretched from the front of the room to the back and only a little space separated each row. We were quiet and attentive for the most part. The nuns scared us just by their looks and their black and white habits. You could only see their hands and faces. They weren’t people in the same way my parents were. They were a different breed. 

In the sixth grade, I promised myself I would travel. I would see the world. When I was in high school, one family vacation was at Niagara Falls. We went into Canada, my first foreign country. It seem didn’t foreign, but I still counted it, number one on my list. 

My next country was Finland. My friend and I flew to London where we caught the PanAm flight to Helsinki. The flight also stopped in Oslo and Copenhagen. Most of the other passengers left at those two stops. What had been a full plane was down to about fifteen people for Helsinki. I wondered why. What was it about Helsinki? I never found out as Finland is one of my favorite countries. I stayed in a hostel which had been housing for the 1952 Olympics. I shopped at the market, the one where boats filled with goods were tied to the pier. Because the second language was Swedish, I didn’t know what the dishes I ate were called. I went by looks and smell. I took a train to Rovaniemi, the capital of Lapland. From there I took a bus to Inari, above the Arctic Circle. It was midnight sun time, 24 hours of light. Herds of tended reindeer were on the sides of the road. I had reindeer meat for dinner, not one of Santa’s I assure you. I loved Inari.

From Helsinki, I took a train to what was then Leningrad. There were only three passengers and one train server in the car. The server would come to each of us and say,”Tea?” I drank more tea on the trip than I ever drank in one place. When we got to the Russian border, our car was disconnected from the train and soldiers boarded. They checked our passports and backpacks. They didn’t find the tomato I hid.

I’m ending today’s story with the soldiers and the tomato. There is so much more I’m saving for another day.