Showers are predicted for today so the morning is a bit dark. There is a slight breeze ruffling the leaves on the oak trees. The dogs are having their naps. It’s a quiet morning.

My dance card is empty. I do have my usual weekly errands but not today. I figure it is time to do a bit of cleaning, mostly upstairs. I will never have a dog with white fur again.

When I was a kid, one of the best sounds of summer was the bell announcing the arrival of the ice cream man’s truck. Johnny was the ice cream man’s name. He used to stop at the top of the hill near the little rotary. Kids ran home from all directions yelling, “Johnny is here!” I mostly bought popsicles. My favorite was root beer followed closely by cherry. They were only a nickel. When I was really young, I wasn’t good at catching the drips. My hand and wrist had lines of red from the cherry, and my fingers got sticky. As I got older, I learned the popsicle technique. Licking from the bottom up was the key, and you had to be careful because sometimes the top part of the popsicle would fall off and hit the ground, a tragedy. It was the same with ice cream cones. As the ice cream melted it dripped down the cone. I remember my mother sometimes wrapped a napkin round the cone to catch the drips. It always got messy. Sometimes the bottom of the cone leaked. I think a sign of the end of childhood is eating an ice cream cone with no mess, no drips, no napkin.

I remember buying Push-Up ice cream. It was like an orange sherbet and came in what looked like a toilet paper roll with a stick in the bottom middle. That was the push-up part. They were a dime.

I still love ice cream. My current favorites are coconut and coffee chip. I eat ice cream out of a bowl now, and sometimes I add chocolate syrup or hot fudge to make a sort of sundae. Every now and then I still buy what my father, who worked for an ice cream company, used to call an ice cream novelty. I buy Drumsticks, sort of portable sundaes, sugar cones with vanilla sort of ice cream, chocolate shells and nuts. I don’t buy them often. They get eaten really fast.

Last night’s storm was classic, right out of an old mystery novel. The thunder rumbled, the lightning lit up the night and the rain poured. If I were living in a decrepit mansion, I’d expect to see a dead body in the library. It rained a long time. I am a lover of storms.

My dance card is nearly empty this week. If I didn’t have uke and my usual dump run, I’d have nothing listed, but I don’t really mine. The summer will be busy enough.

When I was a kid, this time of year went slowly. I could barely wait for summer vacation, but I had to suffer through final exams before that happened. I still remember one final because it was peculiar. It was music, and it had a section on Gregorian chant. I still don’t know why. Never in my life have I been asked to read the notes in Gregorian chant.

Where I lived in Ghana was the driest part of the country. It didn’t rain for months. The roads turned dusty. Riding anywhere meant being covered in dust and even tasting it. Nothing grew. The fields were empty. The brown stalks of corn and millet had been burned. I remember the days of smoke as the fires moved across the fields. The water was turned off a few days a week, but I was ready. I filled all of my water bottles ahead of time and kept them in the fridge. I had buckets I used to fill, and I’d line them up in the shower for my nightly bucket baths. I became an expert at taking a bucket bath. I’d even have leftover water to flush the toilet at the end of the day. Food choices in the market were limited. Some tomatoes were grown through irrigation so I could always find them and usually onions. I also ate yams, tuber yams which looked a bit like tree trunks. My heels and lips cracked. I walked on my tip toes. The heat was extraordinary, but it was dry which made it bearable. I’d go to bed wet after my shower or my bucket bath. It was the best way to fall asleep in the heat. I became an expert in dry season survival.