I love my den in the mornings. The cool night air lingers, and I can see the beauty of the day through my window. I hear birds singing and my chimes sweetly ringing. The three pets take their morning naps on their usual spots: Maddie on the chair and Fern and Gracie each sleeping on a couch pillow.

Every Monday I spend an hour or more with my neighbor. I was helping her learn the booklet for her citizenship test, and she passed that and has been sworn in as an American citizen. Now we just chat as we are concentrating on her verbal English. We are working mostly on has or have. Sometimes I have no idea what she is trying to tell me so we go slowly word by word. I help her pronounce words. English isn’t easy is what she tells me all the time.

The Fern crisis has put me behind. I haven’t yet connected the adaptor to the umbrella nor have I started the fountain. The rail lights stopped working, and I haven’t replaced. This is my deck week. Today I need clay pots and flowers to replace the ones the spawn broke. I sometimes wish I were Granny Clampett happy to have a squirrel for stew. I’d be in the kitchen chopping vegetables right now.

In Iceland I had Icelandic game for dinner at a really lovely small restaurant. I always like to try food native to any country I’m visiting. The meat was wonderful, perfectly spiced and cooked. I remember puffin and goose, but there was one more meat I don’t remember. My neighbors are Brazilian. In the summer I can smell their dinner cooking. It is not an aroma I know. Come to find out it is a meat stew served with a side of rice and plantain. One night I was there for a barbecue. They served linguica which was a very different linguica than the sort I usually buy. This was Brazilian, not Portuguese. It looked like any sausage, not the reddish color I buy. You buy this by the pound and it’s one long strand of meat. It reminded me of what they use for intestines on The Walking Dead. That may sound gross, but it didn’t prevent me from digging right in. The meat was so delicious I decided right then and there I would make the trek to Hyannis and the Brazilian butcher.

The only food which made me think twice was grasscutter in Ghana. It was a giant rodent. I think if I had seen it before eating it I would have been hesitant, but I had been eating it for year or more so I just didn’t care. Bring on the rodent.