Today is winter. It is a drab day with a temperature of 38°, the high for the day. I could feel the cold when I opened the back door for the dogs. They didn’t stay out for long. I do have a coat for each of them, but they are not out long enough to need one. Nala’s coat was once Gracie’s. She wore it on every winter walk. Henry was fitted for his coat. He doesn’t like it, no surprise there.

When I was a kid, my mother was the arbiter of cold weather garments. She was a firm believer in layering. No one told her back then. She just knew, one of those mother things. I wore a sweater under my winter coat. I wore heavy socks, sometimes knee socks. I wore pink long underwear which came to my knees. The final touches were a scarf, my wool hat and my mittens. By the time she’d finish dressing me in the morning very little of me was open to the cold air, but all of this warmth came with a price. I had to take everything off at school except my sweater.

The classrooms in the old school had tall radiators below the long windows. They hissed and gurgled and steamed. They were the background sounds every cold winter’s day, but after a while, we stopped hearing them. On the coldest days, the windows were steamy, wet.

The windows at home sometimes had a layer of frost from the radiator steam. I used to write on the frost using my fingernail. I remember the steam hissing from the radiator under the window at the foot of my bed. Sometimes it also made a banging noise. They were the sounds of winter.

The sun was here earlier, but it has since retreated behind the clouds. Today it will rain. It is 56° but the breeze makes it feel colder. Much earlier, I stood on the deck for a while just to take in the morning. Leaves were being blown. I could hear the dogs crunching through the fallen leaves in the backyard. I could hear birds.

Every day I have a chore list, or maybe I should call it the chore list as it has become a permanent list, the same every day, as I don’t finish anything on it despite my great intentions. That used to bother me. It doesn’t anymore.

My dance card is, as usual, uke-centered, but with one exception. Tomorrow is shot day. I’m getting two. Starting Tuesday I have uke practice, a lesson on Wednesday and concerts on Wednesday and Saturday. I hate getting dressed for so many days in a week.

Last night I went through the pictures of my time in Ghana. The bus to the airport picture reminded me of my last phone call to my parents. It was the night before the bus and the flight. My mother cried about a sweatshirt. She said I had left it on the bed, and while she was folding it, she thought about not seeing me for two years and not folding another sweatshirt. My father said don’t worry if I want to come home, but I knew I wouldn’t. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew. They told me to write and let them know I had arrived safely. I promised I would. I did.

I am so very young in all those pictures. I was twenty-one when I arrived and turned twenty-two before the end of training. I had wanted to be a Peace Corps volunteer almost half of my life. I was excited about Africa, but I was nervous. I didn’t know what to expect, but I think I would have felt the same no matter where I was going. I didn’t know anyone who had been in the Peace Corps or even wanted to be. I was on my own. That was scarier than anything. As we stood in line to check in, we chatted. Come to find out we all felt pretty much felt the same way. That was our first bond, and we hadn’t even left yet, but we had something together. I wasn’t on my own anymore.