It rained during the night, and the wind was fierce. One pine tree swayed so much I thought it would snap. When I woke up a couple of hours ago, it was still damp and cloudy. Now the wind has disappeared, the sun is shining, and the day is getting warmer. It’s a pretty Sunday morning.

Today is Palm Sunday. I remember my mother and a father had an old wooden crucifix over their bed and stuck behind it all year were palm fronds. Every Palm Sunday my mother would change the fronds after she’d come back from mass. The old ones were so dry their ends were like needles, and I remember being stabbed by a palm frond as I helped my mother.

I never worked when I was in high school, but I did babysit for extra money. It was easy. Once the kids were in bed, I could watch TV or read and get paid for doing it. It was so long ago, though, I don’t remember how much I got an hour, but I remember it was good money easily earned. My first real job was the summer after I’d graduated from high school and it was at Woolworth’s in Hyannis, and I didn’t like it much. I earned minimum wage and cleaned mice and hamster cages, worked the register and did whatever else I was told. The store was right on Main Street and was huge. It had a large souvenir section, and tourists could buy shells and star fish and snow globes from China. The store is gone now, replaced by a couple of different stores.

Every summer after that until I went to Ghana and every Christmas vacation during college I worked at the Hyannis post office. It was a great job for really good money. Christmas time I worked noon to midnight while summers I worked noon to nine. The job had little pressure, and all I did was sort mail or run letters through the stamping machine. We could chat and smoke as we worked. I was what was called a seasonal. Hyannis was, back then, a really busy post office, and all the cape mail was sent from there to Boston. Years later, Buzzards Bay became the hub and Hyannis became just another post office. I stopped in there last summer to get stamps, and it looked just about the same. People were chatting and sorting mail just as they had well over forty years ago. Only the smoke was missing.