This morning I was late to the day. It was close to eleven before I got out of bed, but it had been a late night, a close to 4:00 am late night, before I turned off the light.

Today is lovely with a bright sun and an endless blue sky, but it is cold. I have nowhere I need to go, but I do have a list for the weekend. Today is wash day. Tomorrow is dump day. I may even change my sheets, but that might be far too ambitious.

I need to walk around the house with my eyes closed. This morning while I was waiting for my coffee I noticed the bottom bookcase shelves were dusty so I cleaned them. When I went to pour my coffee, I noticed the shelf on the stove needed cleaning so I cleaned it. This has to stop!

When I was a kid, we used to walk all over town. I remember walking on the train tracks and stopping at a pipe which extended just a bit from the bottom of a grassy hillside. Water flowed from the pipe into a sort of hole below the pipe formed by the course of the water. It was clear water so we’d stop for a drink. Not far beyond the pipe, the tracks crossed the road where the red store was on one side and a box factory was on the other. I remember seeing mostly guys sitting outside on the steps of the factory having a smoke break. We always walked to the end of the tracks, to where the station was and where there were a couple of lines of tracks. On one track, a single car sat. I always looked in the windows, and I always wished I could ride that train.

Saturday is my favorite day of the week dating back to Saturday morning TV shows and a bowl of Rice Krispies.

Today has sun and a blue sky, but it is cold at 29˚. The high will only be 33˚. I’m thinking of going to the dump, but the dump is cold and unbelievably windy even when the rest of the world has no wind. I brought out a couple of bags of trash and put them in the trunk this morning, but that means nothing. My laundry basket can sit for days by the cellar door. I am so very wonderful at procrastinating when I have chores I’m not so fond of doing.

When I was a kid, my mother had a washing machine with a wringer. It was in the cellar next to the sink connected to a faucet. I used to watch her feed clothes into the wringer and catch them on the backside. I knew a kid who had gotten his arm caught in a wringer. His arm was sort of flat in one spot and wrinkled. I wondered how his arm got caught, but I never asked.

We didn’t have a clothes dryer until we moved to the cape. My mother hung her clothes on the clotheslines in the backyard. We lived in a duplex among a sea of duplexes. Each house had a tarred section in the back with six clothes lines, three for each side of the house. My mother had to haul her laundry basket out of the cellar and up the outside cellar stairs to the yard then hang the clothes on the lines. I remember she hung shirts from their bottom hem lines. Their sleeves hung down and sometimes the wind would take them. They did a dance worthy of a Disney cartoon set to music and looked eerie at Halloween. When it started to rain, my mother would make a mad dash to the yard to take down the dry clothes. My favorite laundry time was in the winter. If it got cold enough, the clothes froze. They were stiff. When my mother took them down, she couldn’t fold those clothes. She had to layer them in the basket.

I don’t know anyone who hangs out their clothes though I did when I first moved into my house. I couldn’t afford a dryer. Most of the clothes were wrinkled when I took them down so I had to iron the shirts and dresses. I still have that iron. It is nearly 45 years old, but it still works. That might give you an idea of how much I ironed.