“I’ve got the funniest song running through my head, and I don’t know why,” I greeted my sweetheart as he strolled into the room this morning.
“What is it?” he was kind enough to inquire.
“‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.’ It’s an old one. Herman’s Hermits sang it in the seventies, or maybe even the sixties.”
“Sixties,” he said definitively.
“How on earth do you know that?”
“Did I ever tell you about a plane ride I took, where one of my colleagues opened a container of syrup and had it go all over him?”
“No,” I answered, wondering where this was going.
“It was in the sixties.”
“And?”
“Herman’s Hermits were sitting up front. The stewardesses made sure to tell us. It wasn’t a very big plane. And I found an abandoned bottle of scotch in the drawer.”
“There were drawers on the plane?”
“No. The Mayflower Hotel. We were staying at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and someone had left a bottle of scotch in the drawer. It hasn’t happened since.”
“But you live in hope?”
He drifted off to his reading chair.
It’s cold out again today. It’s been cold a lot lately, almost like it’s winter. Daughters One, Two, and Three gave me a heated vest for Christmas, which I just slipped into, set to warm my back and shoulders. Ahh. Such clever girls. This vest may become one of my closest friends. I plan to wear it while Daughters Two and Four work with us on a jigsaw puzzle one of my sweet sisters-in-law sent for Christmas.
I have a teacup collection, largely the legacy of my mother and great-aunt. The puzzle image is another teacup collection. The collections have a pattern in common, a reproduction of one used by the Empress Ekaterina of Russia. The cup and saucer in the lovely cabinet my honey built for our collection, did not belong to Mom or her aunt. I liked the pattern so much that I got them for myself. It’s quite striking, and really stands out in the puzzle image. Whoever gathered the cups for the puzzle must have liked it, too.
The turkeys who frequent Huron Parkway—both the road itself and the area around it—haven’t been seen for a while. My honey remarked on it Wednesday, as we drove the turkey-less length of the road.
“I’m pretty sure turkeys hibernate,” I announced. “They go into caves and snuggle up to a bear, so they stay warm. That’s important. But the really important thing is to wake up before the bear when spring comes.”
My sweetheart pondered this information briefly, and offered one more tidbit. “I thought the important thing was to have a turkey pal you can run faster than.”
Either way, a group of five turkeys were taking a break from siesta today, next to the Parkway near Plymouth Road. Two toms were even displaying, with their tail feathers all fanned out. They may just have been practicing for later in the year, as they weren’t strutting around while they displayed or directing their attentions to any of the other birds in particular. At any rate, none of the females seemed to notice their behavior. They concentrated on filling up with food before running back to the cave.
Did you know that one day of the Michigan’s winter holds a dubious distinction? Dave Rexroth, chief meteorologist for Channel 7 News told us about it yesterday. The date in question is the tenth of January. It’s the cloudiest day of the year.
Thank goodness, none of the family birthdays falls on the tenth. There’s a cluster of them right around the tenth, but they all missed Cloud Day. That’s probably when Al Capp first drew Joe Btfsplk and Charles Shultz first drew Pigpen.
My honey gave me cloud books for Christmas. They’re just what I wanted. Our elementary school teachers taught us what time allowed but, although it stuck, it just whetted the appetite for more. These books provide more. One is Clouds: How to Identify Nature’s Most Fleeting Forms, by Edward Graham; the other is Cloudspotting for Beginners, by Gavin Preeter-Pinney and William Grill.
Having done little more than leaf through the books so far, I’m already learning cool stuff. For instance, we know about sun dogs, right? Those nifty, rainbow-colored clouds that sometimes appear on one or both sides of the sun? It turns out the moon loves dogs too, and sometimes moon dogs appear beside the moon. Also, contrails count as clouds.
There’s no telling what clouds will show up on Cloud Day, but when they get here, we’ll be ready.
January 2026
Glad the turkeys are still around and did not snuggle in with a bear! So good to hear that the heated vest is so welcomed! I have an Eric Carle book about clouds and I’m guessing you have probably read it. Not informational, but a nice story.