Today will be another warm day, 69°. It is partly cloudy, and the clouds will hang around all day. Yesterday I took a ride. All the oak trees are filled with brown leaves just waiting to fall. They add an odd color to the trees along the roadside. My deck and front lawn are covered in leaves. When I walk through them in the front, I shuffle my feet as I go. The sound brings me back to when I was a kid walking in the gutters filled with leaves and kicking them as I walked.

My friends are arriving this morning. With them I have the most amazing memories of Ghana. They lived in the south. I visited them and traveled with them on school holidays. Their house was on a second floor. It didn’t have running water. They had little houses in the backyard. It was a run some times to get there, but Peace Corps volunteers get quite adept at timing the run. Bill hauled water from the town well.

There was an opening for an English teacher at my school as another volunteer had left . She had been unhappy the whole school year. She seldom even spoke to me, just a hello as we passed each other. I asked Bill and Peg if they wanted to come north to Bolga. They did. We still wonder how that was accomplished as all our communication was by mail. I convinced my principal who spoke with Peace Corps. Bill and Peg moved to my school and lived in the other side of my duplex. We ate dinner together every night. We listened to music and we played games. We played Password so many times we had the cards memorized. We played an alphabet word game. We had paddle ball contests. My mother had sent one in a package. We got so good we paddled well into double figures on each turn then catastrophe struck. The elastic broke. We both had motos and took day trips around the town. We had fun. We had each other.

I have a concert today, and Bill and Peg will be there. I am so excited to have someone I know in the audience. I will sign autographs at the end.

Today is a lovely fall day. The air is still. Sun and blue sky are here for the meantime as clouds are predicted for later, but outside is so bright right now that even the brown leaves left on the trees are glistening in the sunlight. It is in the mid-60’s and will stay there most of the day. I was out on the deck earlier. I didn’t even need my sweatshirt.

This morning as I was waiting for my bread to toast I got to wondering. Why do we toast bread for breakfast? Who decided that untoasted bread is not for mornings? I’m sure somewhere on line people have speculated, but I’m not going to look. I like a little mystery.

I remember the first time I voted. I was a senior in college. It was 1968. I had turned twenty-one during the summer, and I had registered to vote right away. I followed the campaigns of both Nixon and Humphrey, but I knew for whom I would cast my vote. My candidate lost. In 1972, my next candidate also lost. I was on a roll, downhill.

During my junior year in college, I used to get up in the early hours on Fridays and go to the wholesale fruit market. I picketed for the grape workers. I remember walking the line one Friday in the rain. I was soaked. A man waiting in his car opened his window and waved at me. I went over. He handed me a rain bonnet, the sort my grandmother wore, and told me to put it on. He said he had a daughter my age.

In the fall of 1968, I went to a George Wallace political rally on Boston Common. I was with 20,000 of my closest friends. To say the crowd was unfriendly is almost polite. He raged against liberals. He said the only four letter words hippies didn’t know were work and soap. “They’re building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia,” was one of his memorable quotes.

I will be watching the results though I know some states will take a few days to tabulate ballots; regardless, I’m doing my best. I’ll have my fingers crossed, I’ll knock on wood and throw salt over my shoulder.