The morning is chilly and cloudy. The top branches of the oak trees and their leaves are being blown by the wind. Today is a sweatshirt day.

My to do card is uke heavy. My friends have been kind and have been driving me everywhere. I am still needing a car. I know nothing about cars beyond the need for oil changes and such. I’ve been checking used car lots. I hope for the best.

When I was a kid, the world was smaller and life was slower. We walked most places. My father had the only car, and he needed it for work. My mother didn’t drive anyway. She’d grocery shop on Fridays nights. My father drove her and waited. If my mother shopped uptown, she walked. She pushed my sisters in the carriage when they were young. Uptown had the shops and stores and the bank and the post office, all the stores except the grocery store which was down the street from the square. Back then it was the First National. The barber shop had only two chairs. Uptown also had the only movie theater and Hank’s Bakery. My mother worked there for a bit. The library is a Carnegie library. The town had two newspapers, the Press and the Independent, the one still publishing. The police news was mostly cats in trees and night noises. The town was first settled in 1634. Every day at 9 am and 9 pm the horn blows from the fire station. Some famous people came from Stoneham. A couple of them surprised me like Buffy Sainte-Marie and Killer Kowalski.

I never worried about walking. I always felt safe even if I was walking alone. At night, streetlights lit my way, and lights shined from house windows onto the sidewalks. Traffic was sparse. Few cars were on the streets at night. Most everything was closed. It was so quiet I could hear the sound of my shoes clicking on the sidewalks. Home was never far away.