I woke up to another lovely, sunny warm day. It is 74°. The windows are open. The air is sweet. Fall on Cape Cod is the best season.

I am grouchy today. I was restless last night. At one point some noise woke me up. It sounded as if something heavy had fallen to the floor. Henry is my barometer. He announces with the loudest barks any odd sound or any people near my house. He didn’t stir so I didn’t choose to investigate and went back to sleep. I found nothing today but the search was cursory.

When I was a kid, my father told us the story of the man with the hook. He said it wasn’t real, but it sounded real to me. I imagined some guy with a hook for a hand scratching screens and windows looking for victims. He wore ragtag clothes and a dark fedora. That last part, his wardrobe, is what I imagined. He came only at night. I remember one Friday when my parents went grocery shopping. My brother and I stayed home. We watched TV. It was then I heard the scratching on the screen. I heard it again and was so scared I went behind the couch to hide. I made the mistake of yelling we’re calling police. I was brave. I was also stupid giving away my hiding place. The front door opened. I was nearly catatonic. It was my father pranking us. I don’t think I have ever been as scared as I was that night.

I remember watching a really bad horror movie. I love them, the worst the better. In this one, some college students had bought a big, cheap house to rehab. They didn’t know it had been the site of a murder, and that a vengeful grandmother was a ghost there. She killed them one by one. I remember a window with only the glass at the bottom decapitating one of them, but the scene I remember most is similar to my having threatened to call the police from behind the couch. Along the stairs, the whole wall was covered in dripping blood. That would have sent me running the other way. Nope, they decided to go upstairs. You can guess their fate. I tried to find the title of that movie but I didn’t.

Movies don’t scare me much anymore, but I did jump when, in Jaws, Ben Gardener’s head suddenly appeared in the window of his sunk boat, and in Alien when the creature burst out of John Hurt’s stomach.

I do like a bit of a scare. I always smile afterwards.

Today is a perfect day. It is 77°. The bright, bright sun is framed in a deep blue sky. Every now and then a leaf is ruffled by a slight, transient breeze. The dogs are napping. They are exhausted from eating a few treats and visiting the yard after a long sleep. I want to be my dog.

Bugs never bother me, have never bothered me. I am not a fan of mosquitos. I don’t understand why they exist, the same with flies. I remember being in awe of a praying mantis. It appeared in the garden by the front door. I thought it the strangest, most amazing looking bug I had ever seen. In Africa I saw my first centipede. I knew what it was and quickly moved away. They bite. A scorpion I didn’t see was running across the floor of my living room. One of my students saw it, grabbed my sandal and did away with the scorpion. I saw fire ants. They were fast and were running in what seemed an endless column of ants. I was so mesmerized I stood and watched for longest time. I was late to tech my class.

When I was a kid, my world was filled with wonder. Just steps away from my house was the field. In the summer it was filled with tall green grass and inhabited by brown grasshoppers. We used to run to make the grasshoppers jump. I’d wcatch them with my hands and put them in a jar with holes in the top. My hands would get brown spots. I figured it was grasshopper poop. I never kept the grasshoppers. The game was to see how many I could catch. I always let them go back into the grass. On one side of the field was a copse. It was where we found a shack which had a pile of girly magazines. We were still so young the pictures shocked us. We didn’t stay there long. In the back the field ended at the dead tree. It was just a trunk and a big limb which was still attached but on the ground. We could go around it, but we never did. We climbed over it. No self respecting kid walked around it.

We followed a path from the dead tree to the swamp which was in an opening surrounded by woods. The path continued beyond the swamp and ended at a paved street. Much later, long after I had moved, the field, the woods and the swamp were replaced by elder housing. My father used to call it wrinkle city.