Unlike the past few days, the weather this morning is humid and cloudy with intermittent rain, a soft rain you barely notice, but the paper does say a chance of thunder showers throughout the day and has predicted them for tonight and tomorrow, but right now the sun is working its way from behind the clouds seems to be struggling, maybe even losing the battle for today’s weather. The breeze is a bit stronger, always a bad sign on a cloudy, damp day.

Yesterday I earned a blue ribbon. I did my laundry, finally, all two loads, watered the inside and outside plants, paid all my bills, did four errands, filled the bird feeders and took all the stuff off the walls in the bathroom which is right now being painted and then around 6:30 met my friend for dinner. Today I have one stop, to buy more flowers for the front garden and some bird seed, then I’m going Peapod on-line grocery shopping. I think I have been the ant, not the grasshopper, for the last two days and deserve a few days of rest which I will gladly take.

We never needed back to school clothes except for a new pair of shoes and one outfit, for the first day, as after that we wore uniforms. My mother was glad for those uniforms as they saved her so much money. Outfitting four kids was expensive. We didn’t care about wearing them because that’s all we knew and all our friends wore them too. Even in high school I had a uniform; all Catholic high school students wore one sort of uniform or another.

My students in Ghana had three different uniforms. Most bought the cloth and had the dresses made. The classroom uniforms were lilac and all the students wore same style and color, regardless of which level they were. I remember watching students iron the uniforms using a charcoal iron. The uniforms were always stiff with starch and wrinkled easily. The students also had their afternoon chore dresses, and there were four different patterns, each one designating the graduation year of the student. The dresses were simple: one piece. Their Sunday bests, wore for church service and into town, were traditional, generally three pieces, and were also four different patterns. You could identify whether the student was T1, T2, T3 or T4 just by the pattern. The patterns followed the students from one year to the next so they only had to buy whatever they had grown out of or worn out. The incoming T1’s would have their own patterns.

I thought of my students when I saw Harry Potter and his friends go into town for the day, for the one day they were allowed off grounds. For my students it was Sunday. They could have visitors come or the older students could go into town to do some shopping, and usually a photographer or two came to the school and took pictures of students into their spiffiest clothes. I have a few of those pictures which were given to me as gifts so I wouldn’t forget my students. They did the same thing at the ceremony last summer. They had a photographer come and take pictures of the event and individual pictures of me with one of them, and they ordered copies. This time it was so they wouldn’t forget me.