Posted tagged ‘dreary’
May 22, 2016
The rain came during the night. It started around midnight. I could hear the drops on the air conditioner. I listened a short while then fell asleep. When I let Gracie out this morning, the driveway was still wet so I figured it rained for a while. The day is dreary, dark and damp. The breeze is strong. It blows the flags in the front yard so they flutter back and forth. Even the oak trees bend.
Yesterday I complained about having little to say then filled the page with small memories, the day to day stuff. I forget sometimes that something memorable doesn’t have to be big. I have these odd pictures hanging around my memory drawers. They relate to pieces of my life but aren’t important in themselves. They are part of the whole, but for some reason, they stand alone.
High school graduation was huge. It was my biggest step forward. The whole ceremony is somewhere in my head, but I have a few small, bright pictures of that day. One is of my dad in the audience. I had just received a scholarship, and he was mouthing to me, “How much is it?” My mother made lasagna for the party afterward graduation. I’m sure there was plenty of food, but that is all I remember.
College left several images up front. My friends and I sat at the same table in the canteen every morning. We drank lots of coffee and each of us did the crossword puzzle in the paper. It was a race to see who would finish first. I remember Fridays in my cosmology class. Three or four of us sat in the back against the wall. It was for support because between our 8:30 class and cosmology at 1:30 we went drinking. Vodka and orange juice was our drink of choice. It was, after all, still morning. I remember standing in my cap and gown downstairs from the auditorium. One of my professors who was from the history department came by to wish us well. I had had her for two classes, two of my favorite classes. She was stopping to chat with soon to be graduates she knew. I was one of them. She asked us all what we were doing after graduation. When I told her Peace Corps, she seemed thrilled and offered to send books or whatever else my school might need. I remember her well.
The flight to Ghana has three singular memories. One was flying over the cape, and I watched with my face to the window until it was out of sight. Another was my stuck seat belt. It got caught between the seat and the wall, and I couldn’t use it. That was after a fuel stop. The stewardesses, as they were called in those days, were going up the aisle checking the seat belts. I just held the one side of mine, and she kept walking. The third picture was flying over the Sahara. The sand seemed to go on forever. I could see ripples. I could see Africa for the first time.
Categories: Musings
Tags: breezy day, cloudy and damp, dark day, dreary, flying to Ghana, Graduation, high school graduation, lasagna, newspaper puzzles, oak trees, Sahara, singular memories, small memories, small pictures
Comments: 6 Comments
March 24, 2016
We’re back to dreary and cold. I had put away my flannels only to pull them out this morning. I’m even wearing socks. I spent a couple of hours earlier with my neighbor, the one who became a citizen. We just chat, my way for her to learn better conversational English. She is still having trouble with has and have. I don’t speak any Portuguese beyond please and thank you so I am quite amazed with her grasp of English, a language with weird rules and odd spellings.
I remember workbooks from elementary school. We had one for arithmetic and one for English. My most vivid memory of a math page was the one on coins. It had a line up of a reasonable facsimile of each coin. I had to figure which coins and how many I needed for something like 35 cents. The answer had to be the smallest amount of coins. A quarter and a dime would get me a check; three dimes and a nickel would merit an X. Dollars were self-evident and didn’t appear in my workbook. We’d do a page or two during the lesson, and sometimes had to finish at home.
The English workbook was filled with things like contractions, subject-verb agreement, singular and plural words and verb tenses. There were pages filled with sentences which had one blank. You had to choose between he or him, she or her and all the rest of the pronouns. I’ve come to believe that many people were either sick at home or sleeping in class and subsequently missed that particular lesson. TV dialogue is rife with errors. I hear things like, give the book to him and I or to her and I, and it makes me cringe. I’ve been told that’s the way people talk now so I should accept it, but what’s wrong is wrong as far as I’m concerned.
I think music and language are similar. If someone plays or sings a piece of music off-key, people don’t find that entertaining. They cringe. They don’t say that’s the way people sing now. I wish language was given the same respect.
I find language beautiful. The right words strung together can fill you with love or longing. They can make you laugh or cry. They have the power to hurt, to cut. Our memories are images described in words.
I accept new words and I know old ones disappear from lack of use. Language is fluid, but the form doesn’t change. A name is a noun. An action word is a verb. The object of the preposition is objective case. It’s him, not he. It’s me, not I. That’s all I’m asking.
Categories: Musings
Tags: arithmetic, coins, cold, conversational English, dreary, English, flannels, has and have, language, music, objective case, off-key, pronouns, workbooks
Comments: 21 Comments
November 1, 2015
This morning it sprinkled a bit, and though it has stopped, the clouds remain. Today is chilly and dreary. When I look out my windows, I see more and more dead leaves hanging from the oak trees. A small tree with some red leaves is all I have left of the colors of fall. Hunker down time is nearer and nearer.
Night has begun encroaching. With the change in time, with the end of daylight saving, it will come earlier. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the whole idea, but I didn’t like it. My afternoon play time was less because the street lights came on earlier. I thought that was a cheat somehow, a parental ploy to get us to bed earlier.
We always had November 1st off from school because it was a holy day of obligation. That was one of the perks of attending a Catholic school. We had to go to mass then the whole day was ours. Today is the holy day and a Sunday. You get to knock off two obligations at the same time.
Clean underwear was always a big thing with mothers. I never understood why because even without the possibility of an accident and eternal embarrassment to my mother I always wore clean underwear. I mean really who’d want to wear dirty underwear? My mother would have been better served warning me to wear underwear without holes. I had a theory that socks with holes and underwear with holes were fine because nobody saw them excluding any accidents of course. I still adhere to that theory but mostly with wearing socks with holes. I turn over the top of the socks so my toes won’t poke through. A few times I tried to darn the socks but instead I got these huge lumps which hurt with shoes on. I went back to folding. When I went to Ghana, I bought enough new underwear for every day so I wouldn’t have to wash any. I have so much now I throw away the ones with holes or loose elastics. My mother would be so proud.
Categories: Musings
Tags: chilly, clean underwear, daylight saving., dreary, early darkness, holy day, hunker down time, rainy
Comments: 14 Comments
June 9, 2015
Dreary is the perfect adjective to describe today. A sunless sky and a gusty wind make it chilly so long sleeves are the dress of the day. Intermittent showers are predicted. I won’t complain. We still need rain.
Earlier I had my monthly library board meeting which never takes more than an hour. We are an amiable group usually voting yes to any requests. Two members are ninety and one other is in her eighties. I always feel young.
When I was a kid, talking in the library was frowned upon. The librarian would shush us and put her finger to her lips to tell us to be quiet. We whispered but never softly enough. Even in the children’s section the librarian created a sense of foreboding. I never asked her for anything, and she never volunteered. Her circulation desk was round which I figured was the rule as every circulation desk I ever saw was round: hence, the name I suppose. The desk was across from the door and there the librarian sat to check books in and out. Those were the days of hand held stamps and book cards on which you wrote your name. I remember watching her carefully place the stamp in the due date box on the slip at the back of the book. She wanted to make sure the date was straight and in the middle of the small box. That librarian looked like she needed the stamp straight. Everything about her was perfect from the bun in her hair to the thick nylons and the black, laced shoes. The only words she ever spoke to me were, “Did you find what you wanted?” I mumbled yes every time but wondered what a no would have brought.
Libraries today are places where you feel welcome and where you can even talk without a single shush in your direction. I haven’t seen a bun on any librarian in years. The librarian in my library doesn’t wear a flowered dress or clunky black heels. She dresses for comfort because that’s the feeling she engenders in her library. She offers help and suggestions. Today I dropped off three books and picked up three more.
I have always loved libraries even when I got shushed.
Categories: Musings
Tags: book cards, checking books in and out, chilly day, cloudy and windy, date stamps, dreary, finger to lips, foreboding, intermittent showers, librarians, library, shushing
Comments: 16 Comments
December 8, 2013
The sun is among the missing again. It is a bit colder than it has been, down to 34˚. I guess the big chill is headed this way so we need to brace ourselves. I can already feel the breeze from the dog door so the back door will have to stay shut. Gracie won’t mind as she doesn’t like being out in the cold too long. She hasn’t a lot of fur. She prefers lying on the couch on her afghan while the heat blasts keeping all of us warm. Nothing dumb about dogs!
I am slow to start this year. Usually my house is already beginning to look a lot like Christmas. My sisters have their trees up and one sister is just about done decorating while the other is well along. I’ll start this week and do a bit each day. My back better hold up for the duration. I love when the house is filled with Christmas.
When I was a kid, our decorations were a bit worse for wear. Many of them were cardboard Santas and snowmen we always put on the windows near the stenciled white snowflakes. Many ornaments were plastic though the best of them was glass. I have several of the small glass ornaments as my mother gave each of us a bag of them for our trees. They take the longest to hang as I hold each one for a while and let the memories of those long ago Christmas seasons wash over me.
Our trees were never showcases. There were bare spots where there should have been more branches. We used to put Christmas cards inside near the trunk in the spaces. I also remember a Coca-Cola Santa who had a prime spot in the middle. The tinsel was silver and my mother always put it on the tree. She was into draping it from branch to branch. The icicles were the old lead ones which hung so well from their own weight. They never stuck to our clothes the way the new ones do. My mother was right. The icicles always looked better hung individually than flung on in piles, our method for putting them on the tree.
I think we always had the prettiest, most colorful trees. Bare spots went unnoticed. We just saw the lights, the ornaments and the icicles hanging off branches and shimmering with reflective colors. My mother would put a few wrapped presents under the tree. We aways knew they were the pajamas.
We could hardly wait until it got dark. We’d run and turn the bulbs on in the orange window candle lights, and one of us would turn on the outside lights then we’d plug in the tree. Every night we were in awe when the lights came on because the tree was magnificent.
Categories: Musings
Tags: bare spots in the tree, big chill, cardboard Santas, cold, decorating for Christmas, decorating the tree, dreary, icicles, memories of Christmas, staying warm, turning on the lights
Comments: 32 Comments
November 24, 2013
Last night the wind blew then blew some more and whistled and shook the house. It was tremendous.
Today is bone-chillingly cold. Patches of blue dot the sky. The wind is not as strong as last night but it is still whipping the bare branches of the pines and oaks. The sun shines weakly for a while then disappears and leaves behind a bleakness, a wintry feel to the day. Outside is not at all inviting.
I have always believed Thanksgiving is more about family than any other holiday. I remember the Thanksgivings of my childhood and being home together the whole day biding our time until dinner. My mother always woke up in the wee hours of the morning to stuff the turkey then put it into the oven. The huge oval turkey pan was blue with small white dots. Sometimes the turkey was so big it just fit into the pan. I can still see my mother straining to pull the shelf out of the oven so she could baste the turkey. She always took a taste of the hard outside crust of the stuffing before she’d push the turkey back into the oven. Her stuffing tasted of sage and Bell’s Seasoning. It is still my favorite stuffing of them all. The windows were always steamed from the heat so my mother would open the back door to cool the small kitchen. While she worked on dinner, we sat in front of the TV and watched the Macy’s parade. She always put out the same snacks for the parade. There was a bowl of nuts to crack and eat, M&M’s and tangerines. I always like the tangerines because they were so easy to peel. The nuts were fun to crack.
When we were young, the menu didn’t vary much. Mashed potatoes were one of the highlights. I remember the big glob of butter my mother would put on top and how it would melt down the sides of the pile of potatoes. I always made a well in my potatoes where I’d put the gravy. I am still a huge fan of mashed potatoes. Creamed onions were on the menu because they were one of my father’s favorites. Peas were mine. The green beans came from a can because all our vegetables did. My father cut the meat with great ceremony and we all watched. He cut plenty of white meat because it was our favorite, but not my father’s. He was a leg man.
Dessert was always the same. My mother made an apple pie, a blueberry pie and a lemon meringue pie, my personal favorite. Pumpkin pie was added when we were older.
Leftovers seemed to last forever.
Categories: Musings
Tags: basting the turkey, cold, cracking nuts, creamed onion, dreary, green beans, Macy's parade, mashed potatoes, my mother, patches of blue, peas, pies, remembering Thanksgiving, tangerines, windy
Comments: 12 Comments
August 2, 2013
Last night it poured but not until well after dinner. It started about the time my guests were leaving. I went out to the deck after they had left just as the rain was starting and found the umbrella lights were on so I turned them off and brought in a few dishes I had left near the grill. This morning in the daylight I checked the deck again but everything had been cleared. I came inside, made coffee and went to get the papers. Just as I got back inside the house, it started raining again, heavily.
The rain has stopped now and the day is dreary at best. I can hear drops falling from the leaves. I feel a chill from the window behind me, the sort dampness brings.
Today is a day to stay off the roads so I’ll occupy myself here. I have a few books I can start and laundry I might do, but after all of my doings yesterday, a day of rest might be what I need. Dinner was delicious. The sausages were just right as were the peppers and onions. I had bought brioche rolls and I toasted them on the grill. I caught them at just the right time. I had the fixings for a salad, but we ate almost all of the cheese and crackers before dinner so no salad. Dessert was coconut ice cream with sea salt chocolate caramel sauce. We didn’t talk during dessert; we just ate.
The Red Sox capped off our evening with an exciting walk-off win. They were down 7-1 when I first checked and 7-2 when I checked again. We decided to eat dessert inside and watch the rest of the game. It was spectacular. People had left because of the score, and I suspect they’ll lie about it if asked. How can you admit you gave up on the Sox and missed one amazing finale?
Days like today invite lethargy. I’m not even going to get dressed. For lunch I’ll have a sausage sandwich and for dinner I’ll add a salad to those sausages. A zapping in the microwave and lunch and dinner will be ready. The cats and the dog are napping. They all had such strenuous mornings lying around doing nothing. They inspire me!
Categories: Musings
Tags: dark day, dreary, lethargic, naps, rain, Red Sox, sausages, walk-off win
Comments: 20 Comments
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