The sun was here earlier, but it has since retreated behind the clouds. Today it will rain. It is 56° but the breeze makes it feel colder. Much earlier, I stood on the deck for a while just to take in the morning. Leaves were being blown. I could hear the dogs crunching through the fallen leaves in the backyard. I could hear birds.

Every day I have a chore list, or maybe I should call it the chore list as it has become a permanent list, the same every day, as I don’t finish anything on it despite my great intentions. That used to bother me. It doesn’t anymore.

My dance card is, as usual, uke-centered, but with one exception. Tomorrow is shot day. I’m getting two. Starting Tuesday I have uke practice, a lesson on Wednesday and concerts on Wednesday and Saturday. I hate getting dressed for so many days in a week.

Last night I went through the pictures of my time in Ghana. The bus to the airport picture reminded me of my last phone call to my parents. It was the night before the bus and the flight. My mother cried about a sweatshirt. She said I had left it on the bed, and while she was folding it, she thought about not seeing me for two years and not folding another sweatshirt. My father said don’t worry if I want to come home, but I knew I wouldn’t. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew. They told me to write and let them know I had arrived safely. I promised I would. I did.

I am so very young in all those pictures. I was twenty-one when I arrived and turned twenty-two before the end of training. I had wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer almost half of my life. I was excited about Africa, but I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, but I think I would have felt the same no matter where I was going. I didn’t know anyone who had been in the Peace Corps or even wanted to be. I was on my own. That was scarier than anything. As we stood in line to check in, we chatted. Come to find out we all felt pretty much felt the same way. That was our first bond, and we hadn’t even left yet, but we had something together. I wasn’t on my own anymore.

The rain started last night. I don’t know when it stopped, but it will rain again during the afternoon. It is warm at 56°. The sky is a white gray. The trees are still. (The sun just broke from the clouds. The sky is getting blue.)

When I was a kid, Saturday was the day my dad did dad stuff like bringing his shirts to the laundry, the Chinese laundry uptown, having his hair trimmed in the small barbershop with only a couple of stools and visiting his friend Pullo at the drug store. I remember Pullo, the owner and pharmacist, had a mustache and always wore a white shirt, the sort Dr. Casey wore. The drug store was small, but it had a soda fountain with a few stools. If I was with my dad, I sat there, spun the stool and drank a coke, a vanilla coke. Saturday afternoon was when my father did his chores. They were always outside chores, like mowing and raking the lawn in the summer, planting flowers in the front garden and in the fall, raking and burning the leaves. In the winter he shoveled if we had snow. Sometimes he’d visit his parents who lived in the same town. He’d come home with a bag from his mother: a carton of cigarettes and some sort of candy like fruit slices. Saturday evening, after our traditional New England supper, he’d watch TV.

Friends I grew up with still live in my old home town. My sister lives there too, around the corner from where my parents lived. I don’t visit. I used to when my parents were alive because I could bring the dog. Now, with two dogs, I’d have to hire someone to feed them and let them out, but I worry about Henry. He doesn’t abide change, and he is a barker. He scares people. Nala is a jumper, a kisser. She’d be fine. Boarding too is a possibility. But for now, I have no plans to leave the cape.

I had to call my insurance company. I have just started a new medication which replaced one I was on for years. Instead of once like the old one, I take it twice a day. I put the bottle on my table so I’d remember. I suspect you know where I am going with this. The next day it was gone. I knew it hadn’t grown legs. I knew right away who took it. I went into the back yard to Nala’s usually spot for pilfered goods. It wasn’t there. I looked all over the yard, no bottle. Inside the house I checked under furniture in case it had rolled. No bottle. It was the dog ate my homework story, sort of. The woman at my insurance company was wonderful. She over-rode the old prescription and okayed the payment for a new one. I said I was sure this was a strange one. She said no. It happens more than you’d think, and people often forget where they’d put their prescription bottles. That comforted me. I’m not there yet.