Today is ugly. The wind is strong. The sky is cloudy. It is only 35°. We didn’t get any snow last night, but a snow shower with big, wet flakes has just started. It will amount to little or nothing.

Today I have a dentist appointment for just a cleaning. Tomorrow night is my uke practice, my first time back to the scene of the fall. Wednesday morning is my lesson. That’s it for the entire week.

My house needs to be cleaned. Between the fall and the plague, it has been a while. The other day I did manage to clean one bathroom and water the plants, big accomplishments for a sloth.

When I was a kid, my favorite vacation was to Islesboro, Maine, an island. I was around ten or eleven. I remember it was the summer of the hat. I wore a visor the whole summer, before and after the vacation. It was the only time I ever wore one. We took a ferry to the island and stopped in town first. I remember the buildings were all white. My mother bought a few groceries.

We stayed in a house down a dirt road. It stood at the top of a small hill. No other houses were close. Below the hill was the ocean. There was a small dock and a rowboat. I have scattered memories of that week. I remember my father buying lobsters for him and my mother. They put one on the kitchen floor to see what Duke, our boxer, would do. He barked and pushed it a couple of times. The kitchen had a radio, and I remember listening to serials. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon comes to mind. My father used to row us to a small beach you could see from the dock. He made two trips to get us all there, including Duke. We’d have a picnic and do a bit of swimming in the cold Maine water. I remember a scavenger hunt. We followed the clues and found the prizes down the road, the Hershey Bars. One day it rained, and I went to the car to read. The rain hit the roof and window. That was the only sound. That is my most vivid memory.