Hot! Hot! Hot! It is already 83°. For some that is relief, but for us, it is too hot for July. It will stay hot the rest of the week and may hit 90° on Thursday. Idleness is the best way to spend the days, to do nothing but sit down, drink something icy and read.

I remember when I was eleven and made the vow to travel. Though I didn’t know anyone who traveled much out of New England, I knew I would. It wasn’t a hope but an expectation. Once afternoon I spent the day at Logan Airport just watching the planes. In those days the roof of the terminals was an observation spot. The planes were all props, and I remember how much the props spun. I’d watch the planes in the sky until they were too far away to see. I knew one day I would be on one of those planes looking out the window watching the land disappear. My first books were Golden Books. My mother read them to me. She’d point out everything in all the pictures and ask me what they were. Mostly they were animals, baby animals. Some animals wore clothes. Hats were big. I remember Chicken Little in a straw hat wearing a shawl with lace. The animals talked, regular conversations. My mother read me nursery rhymes. Humpty Dumpy was also wearing clothes. I remember his yolk on the sidewalk after his fall off the wall. It made perfect sense to me that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. Jack and Jill fell down the hill. The baby in its cradle fell down after the bough broke. The snoring old man woke up and hit his head. Goosey Goosey Gander threw an old man down the stairs. The nursery rhymes were dark, but I really didn’t notice. It was the rhyming I loved, the sounds of the words. I learned new words like Jack’s crown was his head, a bough is a branch and a lady’s chamber is her bedroom.

I moved on to fairy tales. I wanted the goose Jack stole from the giant, the one that laid golden eggs. Like Hansel and Gretel, I’d push the witch into the over so she wouldn’t eat me. Rumplestiltskin is still a favorite. Disney cartoons had me reading Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. I really loved the witch with her poison apples. She was scary and had all those warts.

My first real books were classics. My mother read us Robinson Crusoe. I imagined living alone on a deserted island. It piqued my sense of adventure. To see footprints in the sand would have been mysterious but amazing. The Bobbsey Twins were easy to read. They came from a rich family and traveled. They had hired help, Dinah and Sam. In the first books, they spoke in a dialect I had trouble reading. The twins solved mysteries. I loved the mysteries. I remember riding the school bus and reading Little Women, a Christmas present. My mother gave me the best Christmas presents. I read all the Little Women, Little Men stories. Books do that. They lead to more books. How wonderful that is.

The morning is already 79°. It is also humid, but we do have a strong breeze spinning the air. Regrettably, today is the start of a really hot spell. We’ll get into the high 80’s and, by Wednesday, the low 90’s, uncommonly hot for July here. I am so glad I now have a fan.

Henry is still limping, but he seems to be in less pain. He gets his pills and spray twice a day. I hide the pills in food, but he tolerates the direct spray. Yesterday he did his usual barking at the door, and he slept on the couch beside me for a while last night, all Henry things he hadn’t been doing. The vet did say the limp could take as long as five weeks before it goes away.

When I was a kid, my world was filled with so much to do. My neighborhood was a kid’s paradise. In the summer, the small field of grass below the hill near my house got high. It always turned brown. It was filled with small grasshoppers. I remember chasing them and trying to catch them in my hands. I also remember the brown guck they’d leave on my hands. We thought it was grasshopper poop. We never kept the grasshoppers. It was the hunt and chase we loved. The summer swamp was spotted with algae and had sewing needle bugs flitting across the water. We thought they’d sew our eyes. Trees surrounded the swamp on three sides. On the longest side, a small canal led further into the woods. I don’t know why, but I never looked for the end of those woods and how far the swamp went.

Blueberry bushes along a hill path filled with berries. We never collected them but rather ate them off the bushes. They were big, juicy berries.

What sticks out in my memory is the trunk of a dead tree with one branch still connected to the tree but lying on the ground. It was beside the end of the path to the swamp. We never walked around the limb on the path but climbed over it instead. Kids always take the most interesting way, not the easiest.

My favorite summer lunch back then was a bologna sandwich. My mother bought bologna in a roll so I had to cut it into slices, and I never cut it well. It was usually thin on one side and thick on the other. We always had Wonder Bread which was so soft it sort of fitted around the slices so you could see the lumps. I slathered the meat with yellow mustard. I had to hold the sandwich with both hands.

On my dance card this week are my usual uke events, a concert on the Hyannis green tonight and one in Brewster on Wednesday with songs of the sea music. I have my practice and my lesson. The special event is this Saturday, the Uke Fest with two lesson workshops and an evening concert. It is a busy week.