Keep the Coffee Comimg

Partly cloudy is today’s weather report. It seems to be the weather report for most days. The rain may start tonight, but it will definitely be rainy tomorrow. I believe the weather man said we should expect 40 days and 40 nights of rain.

My dance card is filled with uke, with practice, my lesson and a concert. I am going to have to emerge from my hibernation cave.

When I was a kid, I had to walk to school in the rain. I didn’t have an umbrella or a raincoat so I sat at my desk with wet hair, wet shoes and wet socks, but I didn’t really care. I was a kid. I didn’t know discomfort. That belonged to older people.

Cleaning my house is a lesson in futility. When I vacuum, I swear the dust is hiding and waiting because as soon as I’m finished, it reappears in clumps to plague me. When I was in Moscow, at any museum, we were required to wear covers on our shoes. I figured it was a cheap way to keep the floors clean. I have adopted that Russian cleaning method. Right now I am wearing muk luks over my socks. I drag my feet across floors, and my muk luks collect the dust. Next, I need to find a way to wash the kitchen floor using little or no effort. I’m thinking maybe just gliding in wet socks is the answer.

I remember Jiffy Pop. I remember how long it took to pop while I shook the aluminum package over the burner using the metal handle. My favorite part was watching the foil in the middle expand. Sometimes, if I wasn’t careful, the bottom kernels burned. After the popping, I remember tearing the aluminum off the top and watching the steam escape. My mother salted the popcorn a bit and always added melted butter. My fingers got butter sticky.

My mother used to buy powdered milk. We didn’t drink it; instead, she used to reconstitute it and use it in making pudding, chocolate pudding as we never had any other kind. It was her way of saving the bottled milk. The pudding was cook on the stove pudding, never instant. It always tasted good.

I am watching The Horror of Party Beach. It was made in 1964, is black and white and stars John Scott and Eulabelle Moore. I’m thinking the movie is its own horror.

Mother Nature toyed with us this weekend. She gave us two days of sun then snatched the sun away. Today is another cloudy, dampish day. The temperature will fluctuate between 50° and 39°. Where is spring in all of this?

Dinner was delicious yesterday. I even gave the dogs a taste of ham and a bit of mashed potatoes. They were lucky I shared.

Today will be a sloth day. Yesterday I did some odd chores, infrequent chores. I organized my little library, took down the outside colored Christmas lights and sweatshirt sleeve dusted a few tables. The colored Christmas lights have been burning every night. I’ll miss them, but, as always, the white lights are still on the rail and gate. They brighten the night. They break through the darkness.

Yesterday, I found two pictures of me taken in December 1969 at my house in Ghana. I was twenty-two. In one picture, I am standing outside near my house wearing a Bolga hat and my blue flowered culottes. It is the dry season. The grass is brown all round me, and I can tell the road is sandy. Off in the distance are white buildings with black trim. They are the bathrooms for the middle school just out of the picture. I am smiling. The second picture was taken in a room I don’t recognize. I look so young. I am still smiling broadly. I am wearing a sleeveless sort of house dress and holding a yellow Bic pen with a red cap. A blue aerogram is on the table beside me. I guess I was writing home. I don’t know why I noticed that. I loved finding those pictures.

Today I have another odd chore. I have a few wooden boxes filled with vinyl albums. I am going to go through them to see what I have. They date from the 60’s and 70’s. I know two of them are poets reading their poems. One is Robert Frost and the other is Edna St. Vincent Millay. Two others are drum and bugle corps music. One was recorded at Symphony Hall. I don’t remember about the other. I expect surprises.

The dogs are asleep head to head. My house is quiet. I like it that way.