Arthur passed by closest to Nantucket but dropped on us inches of rain and heavy winds. My deck is covered in oak leaf clusters, one of the heavy clay pots fell and broke and the chimney candle holder which had been clamped to the deck also fell but luckily didn’t break. Later I’ll have to clean up all the debris on the deck and the ground. I’m waiting for the sun before I venture outside. It is still cloudy, damp and chilly. I lost electricity last night for all of ten minutes, but the timing was bad. Gracie was just coming up the steep deck stairs when it went dark, and I heard her trip, but she was fine when I checked her.

When I was a kid, I got fifty cents allowance every week. It seemed like a king’s ransom. My father, the only ant in a family of grasshoppers, wanted me to save it for a rainy day. I never did. Sometimes I’d buy a new book for 49 cents, no tax back then, or I’d shop Woolworth’s for something I didn’t know I needed. On the way home, if I had money left, I’d stop for a vanilla coke, ten cents. Wealth was counted in pennies.

Nobody I knew worked summers during high school except for my friend Maryalyce. She had bought an old car, a really old car with the start button on the floor, and needed insurance and gas money so she worked weekends and summers. We were college roommates one year, the only year Maryalyce lived away from home, and she worked long hours as a waitress to pay for school. The muscles on her right arm were huge from carrying heavy trays one handedly. I talked to her not so long ago and she is still working. I wasn’t surprised. She didn’t seem surprised that I wasn’t.

My sister baked sugar cookies for the 4th using the cutters I had sent her. One cutter was a woman with her leg bitten off, another was a surf board with bite marks and a missing piece and the third was the shark who was responsible. My sister used red sprinkles around the bite marks on the missing leg and on the shark’s teeth. She said a couple of the woman’s arms had broken off but that was okay. The shark probably got those too. One cookie lost its head. It was like Hooper finding Ben Gardner’s boat. When Ben’s head appeared, Hopper and the rest of us jumped. It is still one of the scariest scenes in Jaws. I love the headless cookie.

I watched Independence Day for the umpteenth time last night, but I still had to watch. It is one of my July 4th traditions not at all dependent on the weather.