Today is a carbon copy of yesterday, a beautiful, sunny day, a cold day with the temperature in the low thirty’s, but it still feels like spring to me. In the front garden, I can see the yellow in the buds of the daffodils. The hyacinths have a tinge of purple. My forsythia, a housewarming present forty-five years ago, has tiny buds. Despite the chill, spring still comes in its turn.

The dogs are the barometer for the day’s weather. They stay out for the longest on nice days. Right now, they are still out despite it being their morning nap time. I’ll check in a bit.

Today is another day for cleaning. I’m on an every other day schedule to keep my inner sloth happy. I’m thinking of washing the bathroom floors. The kitchen will have to wait as rain is predicted over the weekend and the dogs will leave their marks. I still have a few things needing to be ironed. I had found them crammed in the back of the closet. They are a wrinkled mess. I’m thinking, instead, I’ll wet them and throw them in the dryer.

When I was a kid, we lived in the project. We never minded calling it the project despite the connotation. It was sort of a small colony of like houses in one neighborhood. We started in a duplex up the hill around the small rotary. It had two bedrooms. My favorite part of that house was a small landing on the set of stairs going to the bedrooms. I also remember that kitchen. The table was against a window. There was never room for all of us. After my sister was born, we moved down the hill to a three bedroom duplex. I lived there through elementary school and most of high school. I remember the kitchen, bigger than the other kitchen but still small. The table didn’t fit all of us. The freezer always had a build up of ice. The stove was against one wall while the fridge was beside the sink. My bedroom was upstairs in the back of the house.

One of my most vivid memories of that house was when my father defrosted the freezer. He’d put a pan of hot water in the middle hoping it would soften the ice. The scariest part was he’d take a knife and jab the ice hoping to break it into pieces. We all knew that somehow he’d cut himself. My father was never handy.

Despite the blue sky and the sun, today is winter. It is only 35°, and, with the wind, it feels much colder. I’m glad I get to continue my hibernation. I only stepped outside this morning just to get my paper and yesterday’s mail. That will be it for the day.

Yesterday I was not a sloth. I vacuumed the whole downstairs, polished and dusted. Today I will recuperate.

When I was a kid, my weekdays were regimented. I got up at the same time every day, my mother being the alarm clock. Breakfast was either cereal, oatmeal or eggs, whatever my mother wanted to make. I always drank cocoa. I never had to choose my clothes for the day. I just put on my uniform. I walked to school. We had pretty much the same subjects every day at the same time except art and music which were less frequent. The times for lunch and recess never varied. At the end of the school day, we lined up to wait for the dismissal bell. I walked home.

The strange part of all of that was I was never bored because every day felt different to me. I got to meet up with my friends, learn new things and have afternoon adventures. Life was filled with possibilities. I always knew I could do and be anything.

In Ghana, my weekdays too were regimented. I had the same breakfast every day, two eggs, toast and coffee, bad coffee but I stopped noticing after a while. I did have a choice as to what I wore, but it was always a dress. I wore sandals. I taught four English classes every day. Lunch was cut up fruit. Dinner was yam and beef in a tomato sauce and sometimes roasted chicken, cooked over a small charcoal burner, my stove of sorts. During the afternoons, after classes, I read, planned lessons and sometimes napped. The only change was on market day when I walked to town to shop.

I was never bored in Ghana. How could I be? I was living in Africa. I was surrounded by the most amazing colors, smells and foods. I had Ghanaian friends, and I had my students who often visited in the early evenings. I was an oddity being white.

Now, I don’t care if I am busy. I don’t care if my days are similar. I am enjoying being a sloth most days. Life is still filled with possibilities.