Being on the deck is tranquil. The neighbors left a day early, yesterday, and the only sounds I hear now are the birds, an occasional barking dog and the burbling of the fountain. Gracie is asleep in the shade at the corner of the deck. It is her favorite spot. She is stretched out along side the deck rail. I’m under the umbrella as the sun is warm, and here I can feel the breeze without the heat. Last night got cold, close the window in the den cold. I was up until the wee hours watching the Red Sox play Seattle. I just wasn’t tired and figured I might as well watch the game. They won.
August is spider month. My house is filled with webs. I clear them, and they return the next day in the same spots. Baby spiders are everywhere. I feel like a character from the end of Charlotte’s Web. I don’t like to kill spiders as I figure the bugs they catch and eat are for my benefit too, but I hate all the cobwebs. Miss Havisham, however, would feel quite at home.
Only once have I ever run into someone from my hometown here on the Cape. She and I graduated from St. Patrick’s together, and she recognized me right away, and I her. She was always the tallest girl in our classes from about the sixth grade through the eighth when we graduated. That was not a good thing as almost all the boys were shorter. She used to walk stooped a bit to minimize her height. Girls, when I was growing up, had little power and were considered lesser than boys in most things. I remember being told my friends and I couldn’t use any of the basketball courts on the school playground at recess. They were for the boys. It didn’t matter that we played CYO basketball. We were girls.
Expectations for behavior were quite different. Boys could be boisterous and playful; girls were expected to be more demure, at least in mixed company. Girls were never forward, not the right sort of girls. We were trained to sit always with our knees together though it was acceptable to cross our ankles and our legs, modestly when it came to the legs. It didn’t matter if we were wearing jeans or dresses. Gloves, especially white ones, were part of every young lady’s dressy ensemble. I remember a pair of mine with a pearl button on each glove to close it at the top.
When I was in Ghana, we had to wear dresses all the time as only yama yama girls wore pants. They were not the good girls. They were the ones with street corner evening jobs.
I couldn’t wear pants to classes in college until a freezing winter my sophomore year when permission was given for us to wear them, a humanitarian move. That opened the door, and it never closed.
