Today is rainy, no surprise there. Today is also chilly at 52°. I was awakened this morning by a summer sound, a lawnmower. It was so loud I figured it was mowing my front yard.
Lie has been quiet of late. My ukulele events and an errand or two get me out of the house, but other than those, I tend to be a homebody. Most of the time I am okay with that.
When I was a kid, I lived in a project, in a duplex. The project had, I think I remember, twelve duplexes. My house was on the corner so we had a bigger front yard than the other houses. In the back of the house was a grassy hill shared by many of the duplexes. Some houses had bulkheads leading to their cellars. My house had a set of stairs. Each of the sides of the duplexes had their own clotheslines and in-ground garbage cans. You had to step on a sort of pedal to open the cover of the can. It had a handle which the garbage man grabbed to pull out the can for emptying. My mother used to have a plastic sink strainer shaped to fit in the corner of the sink. She’d put all the garbage in it, and I often had to empty it outside in the can. Sometimes I’d gag.
I used to get car sick. Most times I got my father to stop the car in time, but a few times I didn’t. My mother used to bring extra clothes for me. I do remember one time. I got sick, barely sick, out the car window. My father said it felt like rain. I didn’t tell him, better he thought it was rain.
The first time I went into a Ghanaian market was during training. It was a small market. Right inside the gate was a table selling dried goat dung pressed into a circle. It is used as fuel. I gagged, ran outside and got sick.
During my third week in Ghana, I was standing on the side of the street and talking to another trainee. We were standing by an open sewer filled with trash and debris. I didn’t even notice.
