My creative juices, my muses, are among the missing. I think they left me adrift so they could go somewhere warm. I have been sitting a while on the couch hoping for inspiration which hasn’t come. One dog is asleep on each side of me. Nala is snoring. They care nothing about my plight. I guess it is time for a stream of Coffee memory consciousness.

When I was a kid, I lived in a neighborhood of duplexes. In the duplex next to mine lived a photographer, his wife and I remember a son though there could have been more children. I remember seeing the father’s photos in the town paper. The wife was German. This was significant. Back then almost all the fathers were veterans of WWII. What I didn’t know was the wife was being called names like Kraut by one of the neighbors. The husband confronted him and the two men had a fight. I was right in the middle of the watchers. We followed them from yard to yard, lawn to lawn. We looked like people following golfers from hole to hole. That was the most monumental event, and its memory lived on. For years, the question, “Do you remember the fight? sometimes popped up in conversations.

This next memory occurred earlier than the memory above but popped into my head later. The field and the dead old tree trunk near my house were always a part of my memory until the horrific day they were cleared and then later replaced by apartments for the elderly. We kept our boundaries, them and us. We never played there, and they were never on my street then it happened. An ambulance, fire truck and two police cars came speeding up the hill their horns and alarms blaring. It was loud enough to get us out of our houses. I was young so this was exciting. We followed the cars and stood on the sides of the road where they were parked. I remember the crowd talking. Now I’d describe their conversations as speculations, guesses, and inside information which ran rampant. They brought a lady out on the stretcher, I could see her head, but her condition didn’t register with me. My most vivid memory of that day is not the lady but rather the excitement from the fire engine being on the street and from seeing the firemen carrying a hose and what looked like a Klingon weapon. I found out much later her robe had caught on fire from her stove and had burned her. I never heard anymore.

These are two rare memories. They just sort of showed up today.

Winter reigns. It is another grey, cold day. Right now it is 28°. The high for today will be 32°(insert snort of derision here). I could go to the dump but I doubt I will. I am into warmth and comfort. I am into cozies and hot coffee. I am into staying home. As Scarlett was wont to say, “I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”

We have a little bit of snow on the ground but only on yards and lawns and my car of course. The snow crunches underneath when I walk on it. We had a bit of a melt then the cold came back and everything froze. Walking takes attention.

When I was a kid, we’d walk across the field on our way to school. Winter walks were the most fun. The snow tops on the field often froze. We could never resist them. We’d put our school bags down, get running starts and jump on the snow tops. They would crack and send snow quake lines cross the field to break the snow. We watched the lines travel. They became snow quakes. They never moved in a straight line. They moved quickly across the snow tops. We always watched for a while.

Where I lived in Ghana is the hottest part of the country, the driest part of the country. The worst weather is during the Harmattan occurring from December to February. Intense, dry winds come and cover everything in dust. Cleaning doesn’t clean. The air is so dry that lips and heels crack. Mosquitos and most other bugs disappear. The water is turned off a few days during the week so filled buckets waited in the shower room for my nightly shower, a Harmattan bucket bath, and toilet flushing. I got hoarse from the dust, walked on my tiptoes when my heels cracked from the dryness, stopped missing the rain and learned to live with haze. The Harmattan had one bright spot, the nights. I did love the nights. They were cold, down to the 50’s. I snuggled under a scratchy wool blanket on my bed. I never imagined I would need a blanket in Ghana.