Yesterday was a busy day. I am not a lover of busy days. I guess it is the sloth in me. Yesterday was also cold, wintry cold. I was out twice for my uke, a morning lesson and an afternoon concert. We are still in the bluegrass book. We start Christmas practice next week. My big chore for today is organizing all my Christmas songs.

I have a few records from my childhood. They are yellow and red and include Frosty and Rudolph. I used to sit in my room, play my records and sing along. We learned Christmas carols, the religious ones, in school. We used the John Hancock book of Christmas carols. The books were small and the covers had a winter scene including a church with giant stain glass windows and a night sky covered with stars. I still have one. I put it out every Christmas.

I have many vinyl Christmas albums. Some of them were give-a-ways. A couple are from Firestone Tires, a shop that used to be on Main Street. The music is familiar, but the singers aren’t always.

Sometimes I am surprised at how old I am. I notice most when I try to do things I used to do easily. I am also taken aback at how wrinkled I am. My face has tracts of wrinkles. My arms have wrinkles that look like they could use a bit of ironing.

My mother used to trick us. I believed everything she told us. I remember she told us our tongues turned black if we lied. She also told us only mothers could see the liar’s black tongue. Little did we realize the liar gave himself away. She’d ask a question then she’d ask us to stick out our tongues. The liar always covered his mouth. We were surprised she caught the liar every time. I don’t remember how old I was when I realized how crafty my mother was.

One of my favorite snacks was Saltines covered with butter. Sometimes I’d dip them into soup. An oil slick would appear at the top of the bowl. It wasn’t colorful as the ones at gas stations were. It was really a butter slick. Every now and then I still buy Saltines, and I still slather them with butter.

Today I will vacuum downstairs and water the plants. That’s enough.

Today is winter. It is a drab day with a temperature of 38°, the high for the day. I could feel the cold when I opened the back door for the dogs. They didn’t stay out for long. I do have a coat for each of them, but they are not out long enough to need one. Nala’s coat was once Gracie’s. She wore it on every winter walk. Henry was fitted for his coat. He doesn’t like it, no surprise there.

When I was a kid, my mother was the arbiter of cold weather garments. She was a firm believer in layering. No one told her back then. She just knew, one of those mother things. I wore a sweater under my winter coat. I wore heavy socks, sometimes knee socks. I wore pink long underwear which came to my knees. The final touches were a scarf, my wool hat and my mittens. By the time she’d finish dressing me in the morning very little of me was open to the cold air, but all of this warmth came with a price. I had to take everything off at school except my sweater.

The classrooms in the old school had tall radiators below the long windows. They hissed and gurgled and steamed. They were the background sounds every cold winter’s day, but after a while, we stopped hearing them. On the coldest days, the windows were steamy, wet.

The windows at home sometimes had a layer of frost from the radiator steam. I used to write on the frost using my fingernail. I remember the steam hissing from the radiator under the window at the foot of my bed. Sometimes it also made a banging noise. They were the sounds of winter.