The morning is gone. Blame my tardiness on the sun. Because the day is warm and lovely, I dawdled and sat out on the deck for the longest time, even after I’d finished with my coffee and papers. I watched the birds. The goldfinches are back, mostly males still bright and beautiful in their summer colors, and my crow too is back. He watched quietly from his usual pine tree perch. A slight breeze wafted the aroma of food from my neighbor’s kitchen to my deck . The aroma is both familiar and foreign. It is familiar because I smell it often and foreign because I have no idea what’s cooking. My neighbors are Brazilian, and when I ask about the food, I get the name of the dish in Portuguese. I also get a list of ingredients, but that doesn’t help all that much. Some of those are in Portuguese as well.

The winter covers for the new furniture arrived yesterday, but I left them in their boxes. It’s not yet time to give up the deck. When a sweatshirt and the chiminea stop being enough to keep me warm, I’ll cover the furniture.

Because yesterday was a work day, today I play. That’s one of the rules I established when I retired: no two days in a row are to be wasted on any sort of work. The only exception is making the bed. That’s no chore for me. It has to do with my innate need for tidiness.

My mother never made us do chores when I was growing up. That was just the way it was, and I never gave it any thought. She made our beds, washed clothes and did the dishes every day. When we came down in the morning, breakfast was on the table, and our lunches were already packed for school. I’d throw my dirty clothes in the hall hamper, and a day or two later they would magically reappear washed and folded. It wasn’t until college that I learned to use a washing machine.

On a recent Peace Corps Ghana blog, I saw a picture of line after line of clothing drying in the sun. The caption described the clothes as belonging to trainees who had washed them in buckets. Not once did I ever do that. Even during the first two weeks of training, people found a laundry lady. We’d bring her our clothes one day and fetch them back the next. Our per diem money during training was small small, as they say in Ghana, but none of us ever thought paying for laundry was extravagant, especially after we saw a Ghanaian iron. It was kept hot with charcoal.