Today is a day to be out and about. It has bit of spring about it at 54°. Green shoots have appeared in my front garden. They will be yellow daffodils.

Nala was out for a while so I went to check. I know she didn’t get out of the yard, but memories of Gracie always get me to check. Nala is lying on her favorite spot, a patch of grass in the sun.

My house is celebrating spider season. I saw the biggest spider this morning. It was walking by the butcher block on its way to a chair rung. I don’t know the sort of spider it was, but when I was a kid, we used to call it a daddy long-legs. I watched it.

When I was a kid, we lived in a project. It wasn’t what you’d imagine a project looks like. The houses were duplexes. They all had small front beds for flowers and small grassy lawns. The backyard was shared. My house sat on the corner on a hill. The front of my house was a bit different than the front of the other houses because of that hill. We not only had a grassy lawn on the front and side of the house, but we also had a grassy hill down to the street. The front walk led to some steps which went down to the sidewalk. My father parked right by those steps.

Everywhere near the project where we roamed is gone now. Even when I lived there they started replacing the field and the swamp with brick houses containing small apartments for the elderly. My father used to call it wrinkle city. His mother lived in one ground floor apartment in a building where the woods used to be. Every time I was cajoled to go with him to visit her I’d remember how it used to be.

Today was supposed to be balmy, but the wind is strong so the morning is chilly. Rain is predicted.

My mother could sew. She made my senior prom dress, and it was beautiful. I can still see the pattern spread out on the living floor and my mother kneeling beside it to cut and pin the cloth to the pattern. She was nervous about it. She had never sewed anything as big as a dress. I remember that prom. During the late morning I went to the hairdresser. Most of the girls did back then. I got one of those tall dos with bit of a flip. My long time friend came down on the bus to be my date. During the afternoon it started to rain and the rain continued. We went with another couple. The prom was at the Chatham Bars Inn, a beautiful spot right across the street from the ocean. I carried a coat over my head in the rain to protect my hair and dress. The closest entrance from the car to the Inn was through the kitchen so we walked through it to the prom room which was beautiful. We had our pictures taken, we ate and we danced. It was the perfect evening. After the prom, we changed our clothes then headed to a friend’s house for an after party. We had a scavenger hunt. I remember some of it. One clue was in a cemetery. Another was we had to stop at the school principal’s house to find out his middle name. I still remember it was Adolph. That prom was 59 years ago.

I can’t sew so I tend to staple. I can cook. When I have company, I try new dishes, but I have favorite old dishes. Chicken curry is one of them. The first time I ate it was in Ghana at the house of a Moroccan doctor and his wife. It was so delicious with all the toppings that it quickly became a favorite. I remember the first time I cooked it myself. I invited friends, skeptical friends. I had toppings to soften the curry heat, toppings likes apples, pineapple, cashews and raisins. One of my guests took only a tiny amount of everything. After he tasted it, he went back and piled the chicken and covered it will all the toppings. He was my barometer of success.