It is a beautiful day. The sun is bright. The air is still. It could even get as warm as 70+°. The Cape is inching toward summer, and today is a preview, a delightful preview.

I have a concert this afternoon, the first in a busy concert season. In June alone there are ten. The fingers on my left hand are getting meaty.

The dogs scared the heck out of me around four this morning. Both of them, at the same time, jumped off the bed and ran downstairs. Henry was barking though that is not unusual. He is a loud boy. I decided not to go check, but, instead, went back to sleep. The dogs joined me.

In reading the paper this morning, I saw scrum used in a different way. I had only known it as a rugby play. The sentence read, “A scrum of reporters…” I checked and it also means a disordered or confused situation involving a number of people. It was used to describe the reporters surrounding Santos and yelling questions.

When I was a kid, I used to keep a dictionary close in case I ran into a word I didn’t know. Even now there is one by my bed but down here I just ask Duck.

When I was growing up, my house and yard were filled with sounds. I loved the turning sound of the phone dial, the click click. My father always used a hand mower. It too had a click click sound. Our fridge didn’t hum. It always made all sorts of what sounded like grunting noises as if it were having trouble keeping up with its responsibilities. Floors creaked. The stairs creaked even more. The back Door always slammed despite my mother yelling about closing the door. We knew when the milkman and the garbage men came. They had a metallic sound. The milkman’s bottles hit the wire basket. The garbage man used his foot to open the metal cover then pulled out the metal bucket filled with garbage. When he was done, he’d use his foot to slam the cover down.

I remember the sounds of the stores uptown. Cash registers had bells sounds and their drawers had metallic clangs when they slid open. There was no music in stores, but every now and then the supermarket had an announcement. Bells hanging on the door frames rang when shop doors were opened. At the bus stop by the movie theater, the bus engines were noisy and smoke always came out of the exhaust.

In my house and yard the sounds are intermittent. The sweetest sounds are the birds greeting the day, and the chimes ringing in the wind. When the school bus goes noisily down the street, Henry Barks. The landscapers are the noisiest. Henry barks at the sounds of the motors. In the house, I can hear the furnace working, and the clink of ice cubes falling into the tray. I hear the beep when the coffee is brewed and when the microwave has finished.

In the darkness, the night birds sing and the frogs croak. The streets are quiet. It is my favorite time of the day.