The rain started late last night. By 2, the wind was fierce and loud. This morning I found part of my front fence down. It has some rot anyway, but the wind helped it along. I lifted it and reconnected as best I could. I’ll have to call my factotum. Right now it is warm at 44° and foggy. The rain stopped a bit earlier and probably will not be back until much later if at all. My sister who lives north of Boston had rain now turned to snow.

Today is a perfect day for movies, black and white science fiction movies. Right now it is Stranger from Venus from 1954 starring Patricia Neal.

When I was a kid, I had only a couple of pairs of shoes. That seems to have been all I needed. My school shoes doubled as my church shoes. The rest of the time I wore sneakers. I remember the toes of my sneakers were sort of pointed. The sneakers were white and usually dirty. I did have snow boots that went over my shoes but not without a huge struggle. My solution was to pull my feet out of the boots first then pull my shoes out. I did the reverse going home.

In elementary school I got graded for silent reading. I always did well, always A’s. I never thought about how that grade came to be. Later I figured if I had moved my lips or had moved my head from line to line I’d have done poorly.

I remember the warm-up writing exercises for Palmer Method: the circles, the loops and the straight up and down lines. My circles were closer to squares. Sometimes I smeared my lines. The ribbon for Palmer Method always remained elusive.

In the seventh grade I was told a long held life fact. It was a non-nun year so I had a teacher. She was oldish, at least in my eyes. I remember trying to get one of the basketball hoops in the school yard for girls to use during recess. Many of us played CYO basketball for the parish so it made sense. That teacher told me no and wondered if I had my friend, a euphemism for getting my period, yet. I didn’t, but I also didn’t understand why that precluded us from playing basketball and told her so. She said once I got it I would understand. I never did.

The morning is cloudy. Despite the wind advisory, there is no wind. It is 41°, about the usual most days now. Rain is predicted for tonight into tomorrow.

On rainy days when I was a kid, my classroom was dark, despite the lights. I found the darkness comforting in an odd way. I could hear rain drops hitting the windows and the shuffling of papers and books as we moved from lesson to lesson. Sometimes the rain was louder than the nun so we read quietly. Our literature books were thick with stories. Questions were at the ends of each story. They kept us quiet and busy. We left our desks to go downstairs to the bathrooms, and at lunch we could move around the room, but we always missed the freedom of recess.

Summer rain has always been my favorite. When I was a kid, I loved it when the water flowed like a river where the sidewalk meets the road. We’d kick and splash our way down the street through the gutter. When I saw the movie It, the drain scene between Georgie and Pennywise reminded me of those days of splashing down the gutter to the drain, but we didn’t see a single clown.

In Ghana, life seldom slowed down in the rain though sometimes it paused a little when the rain was the heaviest. I needed rainy day back up lessons because the rain on the tin roofs made hearing anything but the raindrops impossible. Mostly my students read or wrote an essay, harkening back to my own school days.

I loved the sound of the rain pelting the tin roofs in my classrooms and at home. I was surrounded by rain without getting wet. On one of my visits back to Ghana, I got caught in heavy rain so I stood under the roof overhang of a small seamstress shop near the market. Once they saw me standing there, I was invited to sit inside the small shop. A chair was provided, and I sat and watched the women cut and sew. We smiled and nodded at each other, about the only way we could communicate. I didn’t know FraFra, and the ladies knew little English. Their kindness kept me dry.

I have a concert today and I have trash. That means first the dump then the mall where we are playing. I got up early but not early enough so today Coffee is taking a small break!