The weather report says mostly cloudy, but I’m thinking that a sky thoroughly filled with light grey clouds is a bit more than partly. It will be warm, 41°. The weekend weather will be even warmer. The winter is strange this year.

When I was a kid, I would always look for the man in the moon. I could see his mouth opened always in surprise. Hey Diddle Diddle is still one of my favorite nursery rhymes. It had me imagining. I could see the cow jumping over the moon while the cat fiddled. I laughed about the dish and the spoon.

We couldn’t eat meat on Friday so that limited the lunches my mother could pack. Tuna was her go to sandwich. I ate it on countless Fridays. I ate it so often I don’t like tuna. When I was in Ghana, the rainy season was late one year. That meant no new crops, no yams. Rice, though, was plentiful so I ate it pretty much every night. I don’t eat much rice now except fried rice and jollof rice, a Ghanaian dish I love and ate, by choice, just about every night on my last trip back.

I can eat hot dogs without tiring of them. Mostly I eat them in buns. I slather them with mustard. My fridge is loaded with all different tasting mustards, all except yellow mustard. My favorite of late is German mustard. I also add relish or piccalilli and sometimes chopped onion. I never, never add ketchup. That, to me, is a mortal sin, the big sin.

My days all have the same pattern, a bit of hibernation. I go out to the dump every couple of weeks and match it with other errands. I pick up needed groceries. I go out for my uke. I’m not sure you can count it, but I do go across the street to get my mail. It is outside after all. I wear my cozies every day. I wear slippers or muk luk socks lined in fleece. I have no problem staying home. I have adapted well to the cold and to winter.

The sun is shining. The blue sky is speckled with puffy clouds. The air is still. It is actually warm at 40°. Today is a lovely day. The dogs went out, came back inside for a treat then went back out again. They are still in the yard. They are my barometers.

I have favorite places. The first, as you might figure, is Ghana. It is a second home to me. When I went back after so many years, it was very different than when I had lived there, but in some ways it was very much the same. I recognized my Bolga even though it was now huge. I easily found my school and house. On market day, I wandered the market so much bigger than my market had been. I felt comfortable. I felt at home.

Portugal is on the list. I went there with my parents. We always had a deal. I would drive if they paid for the car. We traveled from Lisbon to the Douro Valley. We stopped along the way. My mother and I climbed a hill to see Iron Age ruins. We stopped at Roman ruins still being excavated. The town of Óbidos was one of my favorite stops. I took the narrow walkway along the castle walls which surround the town. The view was extraordinary. If I had to imagine a castle, it would look like the one in Óbidos. Miranda do Douro was another stop. We wandered the narrow streets and stopped for lunch at what looked almost like an old Western saloon. It was an enchanting town.

One summer my friend and I traveled from Venezuela to Rio. That trip lasted almost eight weeks. I can’t even begin to describe all the places I loved. Here is the short list: Ecuador, especially the old town in Quito, the gold museum in Bogota, the salt mine in Columbia, Puno and Lake Titicaca, the Iguazu Falls, the altiplano in Bolivia, La Paz and the Parana River trip from Paraguay to Argentina. There are more but this is enough.

I have been lucky to see so much of the world. The vow, the promise, I made when I was eleven was to travel, and it was fulfilled.