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.