I won’t bore you with a description of today’s weather. Ditto ought to be enough.

We all slept in this morning: Gracie, Fern and I. It was really late or early morning depending on how you look at time before I finally went to bed. It was 10 o’clock when I woke up. Gracie and Fern are already back to napping. Maddie is also napping. She is beside me on the couch and right next to the dog. This is monumental. Gracie has been chasing Maddie since Gracie first walked in the door when she was a puppy. Lately, though, Gracie ignores Maddie more than she chases her. They have even sniffed noses, an intimate move in the animal world. I don’t know if its familiarity after 7 years or just boredom which has caused Gracie to give up the chase. Poor Maddie has finally stopped running.

In grammar school, when I was in the first or second grade, we sometimes colored pictures near Christmas. The pictures were always of the manger scene, no Santa and no reindeer. The nun would have us pull out our boxes of crayons and we’d get busy. I remember I always made the straw yellow, a bit bright, but that was as close I could get to the real color of straw as shading colors was way off in my future. The halo over the Baby Jesus was the same color as the straw; a box of Crayola crayons in those days had limitations. The scene also had Mary and Joseph, the manger, always colored brown, a donkey and a shepherd with a lamb across his shoulders. I colored Mary’s dress blue because every statue had Mary in blue, different shades but still always blue. Joseph wore brown. The shepherd wore green and brown. The lamb wore white.

I’d scrawl my name at the top. It usually went all the way across the paper as I hadn’t yet mastered sizing my letters. Most time only Kathleen R. fit, and it was never written in a straight line. It sloped on the right and started going down the page. It didn’t matter. I was always proud of my work. It was perfect for hanging on the refrigerator art gallery.