The morning is already hot at 81°. Nala was panting. Now, she is having her morning nap. I am in the back of the house in the den. It doesn’t get sun until the afternoon so it is coolish. I haven’t turned on the AC yet but it’s coming. I like the cold the AC brings but with windows and doors closed I miss the sounds of the birds, the bang of the acorns hitting the deck and the swoosh of the leaves in the breeze.

When I was a kid, we didn’t even have a fan. All the windows and doors were open, but the house was hot. The living room was always dark. My mother kept the sun out by covering the windows. My sisters used to run through the sprinkler to get cool in the hot afternoon. I don’t remember being bothered by the heat. I always wore shorts and a sleeveless blouse and sneakers. They were dirty white sneakers with pointed toes. An axiom I figured out as I grew older is the dirtier the white sneakers the younger you are. It’s sort of the same with ice cream. The drippier the cone the younger you are.

I remember a small pond in the woods a bit of a distance from the house. One summer my brother and I built a raft though built is probably an exaggeration. We used vines to connect the branches and pieces of trunks we found in the woods. We launched our raft. Our raft sank, and we got wet. We thought it was funny. We did dry quickly.

In the middle of the field at the bottom of my street was a bubbler. The water was always cold. We taught the dog how to drink from the bubbler. Of course, we had to hold the button. I remember when we walked the tracks, there was a spot where water gurgled from a pipe. The water below the pipe formed a bit of a stream and was clear. We could see the dirt. We used to drink from the pipe. We used to eat any berries we found except for the small round red berries. My brother ate some once and had to have his stomach pumped.

This is my uke free day. I have a concert tomorrow so today is my errand day. The weekend is my housecleaning day. I have to wash the kitchen floor. I can’t stand it anymore.

The morning is near perfect. There is a wind strong enough to blow the chimes hanging from a tree branch. The air is sweet with their sound. When I looked out the window, I saw bird after bird grabbing a sunflower seed, flying off to eat and then returning for another. I noticed movement in the yard and then spied a rabbit hopping round and munching the greenery. I was worried about Nala so I went out on the deck to watch. Nala never saw the rabbit.

When I was a kid, I had a dream. I dreamed I would travel the world. I would visit the places in my geography book. I remember the picture of Christ the Redeemer standing tall over the city of Rio. I went to Corcovado Mountain and stood at the foot of that statue. I was in awe. I had jumped into the pages of my geography book. I had stepped into a dream.

I always knew from the eighth grade on I would go into the Peace Corps. Back then there were PSA’s on TV about the Peace Corps. I intently watched every one knowing they were directed at me. My father watched and wondered why anyone would do that. What a waste he thought, spending all that money on college then going God knows where for no money. I decided discretion was in order and said nothing. I hung on to this dream. When I was a junior in college, I went to listen to a Peace Corps recruiter. I even took the language test which measures your ability to learn a new language. I went to a country where English is the official language. I can still remember the day I got my invitation to serve. I was going to Africa. Another dream had become reality.

I have never stopped dreaming. I have dreams which will probably never come true, but it is still fun to dream. That I win a million dollars in the lottery is one of those. I figure, though, I’ll have to start buying lottery tickets. I’d like the elves who visited the shoemaker to visit me but not to make shoes but to clean my house. I am so tired of vacuuming Henry fur and cleaning paw prints off the kitchen floor. The big dream is always to go back to Ghana. It is my heart dream.