The clouds are still here though the rain has gone. Partly cloudy is the forecast with a high of 66°. I’ll be home today. I have a few odd tasks on my to do list. I’m going to reline the kitchen silverware drawer with flowered vinyl paper. What is there now celebrated its 45th anniversary last year. I figured it’s time to say good-bye. I want to rearrange the stuff in the drawers of the small hall chest. After that, I might do laundry but that may be a stretch. I still have clean clothes.

I have an appointment with my surgeon on the 29th at the ungodly hour of eight am. When I spoke to his secretary, she had messages. The pins need to stay in longer. He is hoping I’m using my finger and bending it more, but I find when I use my finger it hurts, sort of a dull ache and an occasional zap of bad pain, but I’ll just have to grit my teeth and bear it.

Earlier, the dogs were quiet and not with me. I got suspicious. When I got to the living room, they ran down the Stairs. Nala’s tail was wagging, a bad sign. She does that when she has been up to no good. It is her guilt personified. I looked up the stairs and saw the gate was still up so she had been in my room. I decided not to check right now. It is a bit scary.

I went to St. Patrick’s grammar School from first grade to eighth grade. I was in the old school through the fourth grade. In the fifth grade we traveled to a different school in the next town over because there were so many of us we didn’t fit in our school any more. That’s when they built a new school. We then had two schools we always called the new and the old. I have bits of memories of the old school. It had beautiful wooded stairs and you could see from the bottom to the top of the stairs, to the top floor. The bathrooms were in the cellar. The girls’ room had exposed pipes and a funny smell, not gross but strange, maybe an odd clean cleaning fluid. There were wooden toilet doors. My first grade classroom had a cloak room with not enough hooks. My fourth grade class was up the stairs. I remember when the tall windows behind my desk were open I could hear guys playing basketball in the schoolyard.

In the second half of the fifth grade we moved into the new school. I was on the bottom floor next to the windows overlooking the school yard. Everything, as befitting a new school, was shiny and bright, but it lacked a quirkiness, a personality. I liked the new school, but I missed the old school, even the overhead pipes and the smell of the girls’ bathroom in the cellar.