“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.”

The weather today is the same as it has been in days: sun, blue skies and a temperature in the 50′s. Wednesday we’ll get some much-needed rain, and I’m hoping it will pour.

Every morning when I go get the papers, I check out the front garden. It is filling up with the shoots of flowers, and I noticed some of the flowers I planted last year have spread, and in the garden close to the house, some have already bloomed. It is still too early to plant as the evenings get cold, but that will give the flowers time to fill in so I’ll know if I have any space for new plants. I love shopping for plants. I do need to shop for herbs to plant in the side garden and for vegetables to plant in the garden below the deck. Last year I had tomatoes, cucumbers and beans. I never thought I’d become such a gardener.

Today is a lazy day. I could go get my new dump sticker, but that can wait as the dump isn’t open on Mondays and Tuesdays. I am going to do a peapod order later so maybe that will count as grocery shopping. The end of my book is close, under a 100 pages, so this afternoon I will get comfy on the couch and finish it. I could do some house cleaning stuff, but I won’t.

The Amazing Race ended last night, and I was happy with the results. Three teams were left for the final hour. There was only one team, a newly married couple, I hoped wouldn’t win, and they didn’t. They came in second, and I suspect the results stuck in the guy’s craw for a long time. Usually we don’t know when the race took place, but this one was in December as we saw Christmas trees and lights in some of the cities. They went to amazing places on this race, as promised by the title, including Botswana, a country on my list.

I am not a fan of reality television except for the Race. I could care less who dances or sings the best or who gets a rose or even why a rose is given. I won’t watch people make fools of themselves, and I don’t care who survives. All of these programs got me thinking about the movie Running Man. I wonder how close we’ll get to that reality or even how close we already are.

“I’ve buried a lot of my laundry in the back yard.”

My house was cold when I woke up this morning. I needed socks. Without warm feet, I’m doomed to feel chilly even in slippers. I felt a bit of a nip in the air when I went to get the papers. Gracie was quickly out and quickly back inside. She and the two cats are having their morning naps. After all, they have been up all of three hours.

I wonder who first decided toast was for breakfast. I toast sandwich bread too but mostly I don’t, except for BLT bread which demands to be toasted. I always toast my bread for breakfast so a toaster is a must in my kitchen. Was toast happenstance or a brilliant idea? That’s one of the mysteries of life. I hate crooked pictures. Why go to all the trouble of locating the right spot, finding a nail, hammering it onto the wall and then hanging a picture you totally forget about? Pictures by their very shape need to be straight. I don’t mind an unmade bed. I like a made bed better, but I’m okay if it’s unmade. I think that’s because I don’t go upstairs enough to be bothered by it. Sometimes clothes sit in my dryer for a few days or even a week until I do laundry again. Folding it and then bringing the laundry up two flights is one of my least favorite chores. The laundry rush used to happen when I ran out of clean underwear, but that’s no longer the case. I bought plenty for my trip to Ghana so the laundry can sit in the dryer for a while. I don’t care about wrinkles. No where I go has a sign which says shoes, shorts and no wrinkles. Dirty dishes in the sink drive me crazy. I wash them by hand every day as I don’t have near enough for the dishwasher, and I want my favorite coffee cup every morning. I hate bad grammar being spoken on a TV series. It perpetuates the downfall of the English language. I care, but other people don’t. I get the line,”You understood it, didn’t you? That drives me crazy. If a song is sung off-tune, I can still hear it. Is that enough?

I have to go out today. Gracie and I have a few errands, but I’ll have to wait until later this afternoon. I’d hate to disturb her nap-time.

“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.”

The sun is shining but it is not warm, a bit of a deception I think. The sky is deep blue and beautiful. Lots of birds are taking advantage of the free food at the feeders. There is even a waiting line.

Hunky dory was part of an answer in the crossword puzzle today. It got me thinking. I don’t remember the last time I even heard anyone say hunky dory which is too bad as it has a great sound when said out loud, and it is one of those phrases which defies description. It’s a context guess but a tough one. Answer everything is hunky dory and tone alone would have to give the clue.

I do the crossword puzzle every day, and I’m noticing that many of the answers seem too easy. Most of these are historical, but for me, they’re like yesterday as I lived through them. I can imagine a twenty or thirty someone sitting and mulling. In my day, they’d chew on the eraser and mull. Now, I guess they sit at the keyboard. I can’t believe that sitting at the keyboard gives the same sort of help that chewing an eraser did. I was able to fill in every square, and I also did the cryptogram in a short time this morning. I felt smart.

Rhetorical questions were the bane of my childhood. “What do you think you’re doing?” sounds like a legitimate question but giving an answer was talking back. It took me a while to sort that out. “Who do you think you are?” was another one of those questions to avoid. It was usually asked when I’d already done something wrong, something above my station. My mother was a master at the rhetorical question. As soon as she asked, “And who do you think is cleaning that up?” I headed to get the whisk broom and the dust pan.

My mother was also the queen of quilt. She got us every time. When she’d ask us to do something and we’d say in a minute, my mother went into her theatrics. “Never mind. I’ll do it myself,” she’d say oozing with self-pity and disappointment. We’d scurry to get done what she wanted. Sometimes, though, she’d add to the guilt by saying, “Too late. I’ll do it myself.” That was a heavy burden to carry, and she knew it. My mother was a master at her art.

“I like stepping into the future. Therefore, I look for doorknobs.”

The sun was shining earlier but has since disappeared. I don’t really care. A cloudy day seems to be the norm. Sunny days are anomalies. It is also really cold, but March on Cape Cod is seldom warm. When I went to get the papers, I stood a while at the front garden. The crocus (or croci if I use my Latin) are fully bloomed and so beautiful. The yellow even brightens a day like today.

I am amazed by how quickly the world has changed. I used to be content with a flickering black and white TV, even for cartoons. Now I have this big HD television and am even thinking of upgrading. My typewriter is in the cellar. It was a high school graduation present from my parents. I was then and still am the worst typist. Wite-Out was my friend as was that white tape you typed over to correct the errors. Now my computer makes corrections, most of the time without my help. I don’t chop onions. My food processor does that. I have three different size processors. I use the smallest one for when I need a tablespoon of something chopped. The microwave cooks dinner in minutes. I use my oven for storage. I do use it other times to bake, but the last time I did I burned a box of crackers I forgot was in there. I have a blender and an immerser. The only machine I don’t have is a can opener. I still use a hand opener. I used to sleep downstairs on the couch in the summer with the back door open. Upstairs was too hot. Then I got an air-conditioner for my bedroom and sometimes I’d stay in the cool all afternoon. Now my whole house is air-conditioned. I remember Sunday drives with all six of us crammed in the car and all the windows opened, but it was still hot and sticky. I sometimes got car sick. Who’d blame me? The car air-conditioner solved that problem. No more encyclopedias. We can just Google anything and get more answers than we imagined existed. My first transistor radio was big, but every year radios got smaller. I had a cassette recorder with me in Ghana. The last time I went I brought my iPod with I don’t know how many songs. My iPad came with me also and was my source for books and amusement. My Instamatic took pretty good pictures back in 1969, but my parents had to send me film as none could be had in Ghana, and I had to send it to them to be processed. In two years I took 290 slides. On my last visit, using my digital camera, I took over 400 pictures in three weeks.

When I was a kid, dreaming of the future, I figured by now, like the Jetsons, we’d have cars which can fly. I expected to be anywhere in the world in a short time, but it still takes 10 1/2 hours to get to Ghana. I want to be beamed, here one minute and there the next. Maybe a bit of cryonic sleep will preserve me until then, but wait! We don’t have cryonic sleep yet.

“I want to write a book about shoes that’s full of footnotes.”

This morning is winter. When I left for breakfast at 9 o’clock, it was 27˚. I saw people wearing winter coats, hats and gloves while walking their dogs, also sporting coats. While I was eating, the temperature rose to 32˚, but that cold didn’t stop me from being hopeful. I still believe that spring is taking hold. The front garden is filled with blooming crocus, and the birds are singing and greeting the morning. The sound is joyful.

The other day I bought a small pot of pansies for the kitchen. The flowers are yellow, my favorite color this time of year, the color of the sun. The daffodils I bought have finally bloomed and they too are a bright yellow. The sun is shining today, and the sky is blue. I am content despite the cold.

Today I have a few errands so I’ll go out in the afternoon. I’m sure Gracie will be glad for the ride. I try to take her all the time now because when summer comes, Gracie stays home except when we go to the dump where I can keep the car and the air conditioning running between stops. The heat is otherwise too much for Miss Gracie.

When I was a kid, I had three pairs of shoes: well, two pairs of shoes and a pair of sneakers. One pair of shoes was for school every day and church on Sunday. The other pair was for playing. That pair started out as school shoes then got worn and eventually demoted to play shoes. I wore those mostly in the winter or on cold days. In the summer I always wore sneakers. Nobody wore sandals back then except little kids. My sisters had white sandals with straps. My sneakers were red or blue when I was little. When I was older, they were white. We all wore white sneakers, mostly Keds, which narrowed at the toes. We kept them as white as possible. Sometimes we even used white shoe polish to cover marks. That had its disadvantages as the polish would seep to our socks and through to our feet, but that didn’t matter. White sneakers were a point of pride.

For my eighth grade trip, my mother bought me new clothes: a pair of sneakers, a blouse and clam diggers. I don’t know if that was a purely regional name. They were also called pedal pushers, and they looked a lot like Capri pants, the Mary Tyler Moore type, but to us they were clam diggers. It was the perfect name. Not many clothes boast a name which fits their function. If you wore those pants while clamming, they’d stay dry and out of the mud. We never did, but we could have.

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”

Enough! Enough! I have endured too many sunless days. Today is cold and cloudy. I can deal with cold, but I’m sick and tired of cloudy. That last storm with its snow, rain, slush and wild wind was just a walk in the park on a nasty day, more like nasty days as the storm lasted close to three days. Nobody complained. Most people just shrugged. That’s the way it’s been. I am, however, out of shrugs. I’m complaining. Give me some sun!

When I lived in Ghana, we went months without rain during the dry season. The sky was blue every day. The grasses were dead, browned by lack of rain. The fields were empty. Any leftover millet stalks had been burned away. Every day was the same. We used to joke by saying it looked like rain knowing full well rain was months away. That never got to me. I knew what to expect. I knew the rains would come as they did every year. It was just a matter of patience.

This morning I filled the bird feeders. It was from guilt because when I looked out the kitchen window I saw a house finch and a gold finch sitting longingly at the empty feeder. I filled a bag with sunflower seeds and went out and filled all three feeders. It was cold out there, and I expect the birds to be appreciative. A thank you banner wouldn’t be amiss.

A few of the daffodils I bought the other day have finally opened. The flowers are beautiful, and their bright yellow has helped a little to satisfy my need for color.

Winter clothes should be colorful. We should be wearing bright blues and yellows and pinks and any other colors which catch our eyes. It is the season most in need of color and the one with the least. Next year I will wear colors all winter.

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

Earliest I sloshed my way to the mailbox and then to the driveway to get the papers. My road is slush covered. Tire marks show the route of my paper delivery, and when I got inside, I could see my footprints. It is lightly snowing, slanted and from the northeast, but I can also hear drips on the deck from the roof. The weather for today is rainy and cold with temperatures in the 30′s. I just hope it stays above freezing. The wind was with us all night but has since pretty much disappeared. On the early news was a house which had fallen into the ocean. I suspect it won’t be the last as the rain pits and wears away the dunes. This is just ugly. The only bright spot is I have heat and electricity.

I stood at the back door while the coffee perked. The storm is a bit mesmerizing with the snow coming across rather than down. The railing on the deck outside the door has an inch or more of what used to be snow and is now slush. That slush is the color of cement and Gracie’s paw prints look permanent as if she walked across the new part of a sidewalk. Lots of birds are hovering around the feeder, the squirrel buster feeder. I filled it the other day so there is plenty of seed. All of the birds are gold finches still clad in their dull winter feathers.

March is a difficult month. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be the first spring month or the last month of winter. Easter is at the end of the month so March best make up its mind. Light dresses and pastels don’t work as well with winter coats.

I know they’ll be snow and frost and windshield scraping. I have lived in New England all of my life and haven’t thought about moving anywhere else. Winter is the price we pay for spring and fall, especially fall. All I ask is a sunny day, a winter’s sunny day is fine with me. I know the winter sun is sharper and colder, but sun is sun, and it makes me glad.

“Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

It is, as my mother would have described it, a raw day, the sort where you feel chilled to the bone from the cold and damp. Right now there is a snow shower with small flakes being blown about by the wind. It won’t amount to anything, but its mere existence is beyond the pale. “Too much, too much,” I whine to no one but myself.

The weather in today’s Cape Times predicted the rest of the week much like today. Each day has the possibility of rain or snow showers. Saturday will be the first sunny day, if the paper’s prediction is correct. I went out earlier and filled the bird feeders. Gracie didn’t even bother to get off the couch until she heard me drop something. She then came to the deck, checked out what I was doing and then went right back inside the house, back to the couch.

Last night I was so tired I went to bed around 9:30, unheard for me, the night owl. I slept through until 8 and stayed in bed under the covers a little bit longer. I was too warm and cozy to face this day. I could see the sky through my window and nothing about it was inviting. When I came downstairs, Gracie went right outside. That surprised me as usually I have to open the door. Not this time: I never closed the back door last night. I guess I didn’t force Gracie out one more time but, instead, just shut off the light in the den and went upstairs to bed.

My legs are still wobbly from the vet bill yesterday. It was closer to $400 than $300, and this was a well dog visit, but the outcome couldn’t have been better. Gracie is healthy, and the vet said she is beautiful. If she didn’t have some grey on her muzzle, the vet said she’d think Gracie is still a puppy. She told me whatever I’m doing is working well as most boxers she sees tend to be overweight, but not Miss Gracie. She also got her nails done yesterday, like a sort of mini-spa.

When I was a kid, we had a boxer named Duke. He never had a well dog visit. He got rabies shots I think but nothing else. My father used to douse him in flea powder periodically. He ate canned dog food with horse meat. He was free to roam anywhere he wanted, and he did. He wasn’t supposed to get on the couch, but he always slept there when we weren’t around, and we could hear him get off the couch in the mornings when we’d go downstairs. Duke lived a long, long life for a boxer though he wasn’t pampered, didn’t eat all natural foods, ate Oreos my sisters fed him and anything else left on our plates. I don’t know if there is a lesson in that. I know we people are less immune to germs because our lives are so antiseptic. Maybe it’s the same with dogs.

I had an idea to do a couple of errands today but that thought disappeared with the first flake. I’m not even going to bother to get dressed. I will out-sloth a sloth today! Maybe I’ll pay some bills so I can claim a bit of industry.

“Dust is a protective coating for fine furniture.”

Yesterday I leaned against the bookcase in the living room and my sweatshirt came away blackened. All that smoke from last week’s fires has left the tops of tables, the cabinet shelves and the bookcase filthy with ash. I couldn’t stand the mess so I polished everything. Someone should have been there for pictures. I’d have grinned broadly while holding the filthy cleaning cloths. I finished the living room, but, as with any contagion, I wasn’t done. I moved on to the dining room then to the den. When each cloth got too filthy, I’d throw it on the floor then grab another from the plastic tube. I left a trail of dusty, dark polish cloths from room to room and felt a bit like Gretel only my leavings were more substantial. When I was done in, I picked up the cloths, tossed them in the basket and took a nap. I had earned it. Cleaning anything is debilitating.

I need medication. The disease is spreading. This morning while I waited for my coffee, I cleaned the top of the hutch in the dining room. On it are interesting bottles and a few carafes, and I cleaned them all. I realized the shelves need to be next, but just before I reached for another cloth the aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air, and I was able to pull myself away. I haven’t been out much or seen many people so I can’t understand where I picked up this cleaning bug. I googled but found no cure. It has to run its course.

Today is cold, and tonight will be colder. Even though the sun is shining and the sky is blue you can almost see the cold. There is a breeze though I think it might be strong enough to be called a wind. The feeders are empty so I’ll have to venture out on the deck later. The birds who visit are many, and I’d hate to disappoint them.

Snow is predicted for the weekend yet again, but this time the Cape will not be getting much, only an inch at most. Boston and further north will get more. I’m happy for them!

I read an article in the paper about how the police have muddled the Pistotius case. It was an AP reprint. The end of the article is worth noting. It quoted Detective Botha, the main muddler who has since been dropped from the case and is now under investigation for attempted murder, about an accidental shooting, date unmentioned, in which the athlete was involved. According to Botha, Pistorius asked someone else, “to take the wrap.” The quotes are theirs!

“The only disability in life is a bad attitude.”

Today is a pretty day as long as you’re looking out from inside the house because it’s cold, and that dilutes the pretty. No drips from the roof and no melting of the weekend’s snow despite the bright sun is a sign of how cold it is. I had to walk through fairly deep snow to get my newspaper, but my plowman just arrived and shoveled the walk, freed my car and made the mailbox accessible for the mail truck tomorrow. I may go out later, but then again I’m liking the warm house.

When I was a kid, there was a blind girl in a neighborhood a few blocks from mine. I didn’t know her personally, but I knew her name was Patty. I remember her eyes were set in from her face and looked black to me. I don’t know if she ever went to school. I really didn’t know anything about her. Her parents would tie a rope around her waist which allowed her to go to the sidewalk but not into the street. Patty would walk up and down the sidewalk and clap her hands whenever a car went by, and I remember how loud the claps sounded. It didn’t seem strange or cruel to me that she was tied outside. I just figured it was the safest way for her to be there. On the few occasions, I go back to my hometown, the route sometimes takes me right by Patty’s sidewalk. I always wonder about her.

Another person I remember was developmentally disabled though in those days he was considered retarded. I don’t remember his name, but he was an adult when I was still a kid. I remember he always neatly dressed in grey, heavy chino work pants, a collared shirt and a light jacket. He walked everywhere around town and shook hands with just about every man he met. My dad always stopped to say hello and shook hands and always called him by name. Just about everybody did. I know he went to all the funerals at St. Patrick’s. I don’t know about the other churches. He always sat in the back and nobody ever minded. I don’t know what happened to him. We moved away and I never saw him again.

While I was growing up, I never saw anyone else who was in any way disabled. Maybe they were kept inside the house or in hospitals or boarding schools. Patty and the man I mentioned were part of the fabric of my town. I never thought twice about their disabilities. That was just part of who they were.