Keep the Coffee Comimg

The morning is chilly at 64°. It is also cloudy. It is a day to stay close to hearth and home. Luckily my dance card is empty for today, but I still have a to-do list of the chores I didn’t do yesterday because I got an e-mail telling me about a uke mini-concert not on the schedule. I had to dress quickly and get on the road. The concert was at an assisted living facility. They were a wonderful audience clapping and singing along. We are still singing bluegrass. I have a concert tomorrow if the rain holds off, my fifth uke event of the week.

Cats throw up. My cat has an uncanny ability to throw up exactly where I walk. Before I go to bed, I go into the dark room to give Jack night pats and food. I walk to the table to turn on the light. I walk on something squishy.

I like pasta, but I am not fond of spaghetti though I’ll eat it if it’s served to me. Spaghetti just takes too much effort. At my aunt’s house, the aunt whose husband owned a fish market, I tasted spaghetti with clam sauce for the first time. I was surprised I liked it. I never thought clams and spaghetti could be a thing.

Though I love seafood, I don’t like salmon. A pink fish just seems wrong to me. My mother told me that when she was a kid the traditional July Fourth dinner was salmon and peas. She ate it poached in an egg sauce. Once on a British Air flight to Germany from London, I was upgraded to first class. Dinner was salmon without the peas. I didn’t eat it.

When I was a kid, they took my field and swamp away and built what my father called wrinkle city, apartments for the elderly. I remember a fire in one of them. We kids all gathered and watched the firefighters. We watched them put out the fire and bring a lady out on a stretcher. She was burned. I can still see it in my mind’s eye.

Henry just scared me. He was sleeping then jumped up and barked. He had heard a dog on TV. I patted him and thanked him for saving me. I didn’t explain about the TV.

We are in the house is colder than outside season of the year. It was only 64° in the house but 66° outside when we got out of bed. The dogs have been in and out a couple of times. They are now having their morning naps, not to be confused with their afternoon and evening naps. I’ll be home today. I have a few chores, the first of which is putting in the storm doors so I can leave the inside doors open.

I have had favorites spots in favorite places. In my hometown, one was the swamp in a grove in the woods close to my house. My two favorite swamp seasons were spring and winter. In the winter the swamp froze over, and we ice skated. We’d also follow the small frozen canals from the main swamp to where the swamp ended. The rest of the year the banks by those canals were too overgrown to fight the underbrush to go beyond the grove. What was neat was the ice was so clear I could see the wild grass looking windblown but frozen in time. In the spring the tadpoles flitted in the water close to the edge. I used to lie on my stomach to watch them. I’d go often to the swamp to watch the tadpoles become frogs. First they had legs then tails.

I’d visit the horses in the town’s barn. It was around the corner from the junkman’s house. He used to go up and down the streets in his wagon asking for paper and rags. Back then, my town was far more colorful, filled with unique people and places. I remember the sharpener man on his bicycle, the noisy milkman with his bottles hitting his wire carrier and the trash men hanging off the backs of their trucks.

In Ghana, I loved one stretch of road between Bolga, where I lived, and Navrongo, some 18 miles north. I lived in the savannah so trees were scarce. Mostly there were baobab, tamarind and pawpaw, but on that one stretch were mahogany trees lined up on each side of the road. I always stopped, thrilled at the beauty of those trees shading the road in the hottest part of Ghana.

Here on the cape, there are too many places to list, but I think my favorite is anywhere with a view of the ocean. The winter ocean is the one I love the most with its wind and white crested waves beating the beach. When I stand on the shore, I feel small in the face of the wind and water.