This is a late morning for me. I slept well. The house is comfortable and cool. Even the dogs hang around and nap a lot. The heat is still with us. The temperature is already 88˚, the high for the day. I have to go out to pick up some dog food and some replacement basil. I wish I could loll.

My friend Bill, of Bill and Peg fame, friends starting from my Peace Corps Ghana days, remembered it was 108˚one morning, around 8 am. It was the dry season when over 100˚ is common for many days in a row. The only saving grace is the heat was dry. I remember everything was brown. The fields were bare. Farmers had lit the fields on fire to burn away the brown grass and the stalks of harvested millet. I used to watch the progress of the fires burning almost in a straight line across the fields. The air was filled with smoke. Add the heat and breathing was laborious. I remember when the humidity started and pushed away the dry air. The rainy season was coming. The farmers readied their fields for planting. After the rains started, I loved seeing the tiny green growth sprouting in the fields being my house.

Each time I have gone back to Ghana it has been during the rainy season. The millet is tall in the fields. On the back roads, you can’t see houses or compounds beyond the millet on each side of the road. The once hard-packed dry roads soften in the rain making travel on some roads difficult. I remember going to Ougadougou during the rainy season and having to get out of the car so it could pass through mud holes and not get stuck. It rained every day.

The morning is overcast. A slight breeze blows every now and then, but the breeze does little in the humid, hot air. It is 79˚, a cool day, at least in comparison. My friend Bill commented about the heat. He brought me back to Ghana when he remembered one day during the dry season when it was already 110˚ in the classroom at 8:00. I do remember those days. The only fan I had was human-propelled. I used to take my shower, always cold water, just before bed and never towel dried. I’d throw on my robe, go inside and go to bed still wet from the shower. I felt cool. Illusionary? Probably.

The day is so very quiet. The heavy air dulls sounds. I don’t even hear the birds. Both dogs are asleep, Henry on the floor and Nala beside me on the couch. I have nothing planned to do today. My back is protesting all the work of the last few days. It hurts but only when I move.

Two things have died, my basil and the H on my keyboard. The basil is easy, the keyboard not so easy. I figure I planted the basil too close together so I’ll buy more basil and singly plant them in clay pots. As for the h, I wrote both small and capital H’s on a new note, always kept open so I can copy and paste. Somehow that feels archaic.

When I was a kid, we used pencils in the first two grades. My pencil boxes always came with an eraser, a pink eraser. It quickly became my go to eraser because the ones on my pencils got used so often they sometimes didn’t erase but left black marks or tore holes in my papers. The pencils wore down and needed sharpening but, luckily, that pencil box came with a small sharpener. I remember one year it was yellow. Every time I used it, I had to put a paper under the sharpener to catch the shavings. I used to sharpen so much I sometimes broke the point as soon as I used it so it was back to the sharpener. The pencils became stubs.

I use pencils still, but they seldom last to the stub point. Nala steals them and chews them into small pieces. I hide them but sometimes don’t remember the last hiding place because I use so many places hoping to keep everything out of the clutches of my consummate thief. My current pencil has Jack-o-lanterns on it, wrong season but darn festive.