Today is another cold, windy, cloudy day with rain expected. It is currently 54°. My house was chilly enough this morning that I turned on the heat for a while. I need cozy today. It is a sweatshirt day, a flannel day.

I don’t even have a dance card. My uke still has to wait for my finger to settle down. The good news is it’s my strumming finger, not my chord finger, so I’ll be back soon. I really miss my uke.

When I was a kid, I was never really into dolls except for a brief dalliance with my Ginny doll. She was small. Her legs could be moved, and she could walk. I used to comb her hair. My Ginny was well dressed. She had fantastic outfits. She had furniture, pink furniture. One Christmas, under the tree, were new clothes and new furniture. Ginny got a bed and a wardrobe which was filled with clothes on small, red plastic hangers. My mother and my aunt had made the clothes. Ginny looked spiffy that Christmas. Amazingly enough, that same Ginny doll of mine is kept on a high shelf in my bedroom safe from Nala. Her outfit is yellowed and her hair needs combing, but she is still beautiful despite her years.

I always envied my mother’s coloring talents. She was delicate with her colors. I was blunt. She stayed inside the lines. I sort of meandered in and outside the lines. Using only one crayon she could shade the color so it looked like many colors. Her Blue was a light blue, a dark blue and a sort of middle of each blue. Mine was just blue. She and I used to sit at the kitchen table and color. In the middle of the table were the crayons from the cigar box where they were kept. The crayons were all different sizes. Some had no paper wrapped around them so we had to guess the colors. I tended to be a traditionalist. I even colored the clouds white though you couldn’t tell unless you rubbed your hand across them. We tended not to talk too much as we concentrated on our masterpieces, but those times with my mother were among my favorites of all.