Gracie and I finally made it to the dump yesterday morning then we went to Agway, a store which welcomes dogs on a leash. It was a perfect Gracie day. In the afternoon it rained a little, but in the late afternoon the sun made another attempt to break through but wasn’t successful. I figure the sun got a bit miffed and decided to stay away a bit longer. Today’s weather is like yesterday’s and the day before that and on and on: cloudy with a chance of rain. The forecast does change a bit for tonight: cloudy with a chance of snow showers. I’m beginning to feel like a mole. (Since I posted this the sun has managed to break through the clouds for just a little while. At first I thought it was a meteor signaling the end of the Earth but my instinctive memories managed to resurrect the word sun.)

I was a cocoa drinker most school mornings when I was a kid. My brother or sister (I forget which one) was a tea drinker. My mother always served the tea in a flowered pot. Thinking back on that, it’s kind of neat to have a pretty pot on the table in the morning though back then I didn’t appreciate the gesture. My cocoa was made in the cup. My mother would put some cocoa granules in the cup, add some milk, stir the two together then add hot water. The cocoa always had some bubbles on the top. We  usually had toast, and in the winter my mother would make oatmeal to sustain us on the cold walk to school. My favorite breakfast was boiled eggs served in egg cups. The eggs cups were yellow chickens. Many were missing their beaks. My mother toasted the bread and sliced it into strips so we could dunk it in the egg. She’d cut the top off the egg and we’d dunk for the yolk. I have those egg cups now. My mother gave them to me when I moved into my house. She thought I should have some memories from my childhood. The egg cups have Fannie Farmer etched across the bottom. I never noticed that when I was a kid.

I had cereal for breakfast yesterday for the first time in years. I think that’s why my childhood breakfast memories popped into my head. Cereal was our warm school morning breakfast and our Saturday morning watch TV breakfast. My mother had boxes of different cereals lined up in the kitchen. My brother liked Cheerios. I was a Rice Krispies fan. I think Corn Flakes also made an appearance though we thought it was an adult cereal. It didn’t do tricks like snap, crackle or pop. I like Corn Flakes now so maybe we weren’t far off. I think a banana really dresses up a bowl of Corn Flakes.

This morning I had coffee and an onion bagel with cream cheese. It was a most satisfying breakfast.