Sunday steps

Last night, after a family-plus-Ed evening meal at Graze (when does an occasional traveling companion and permanent landlord become “family”?) my daughters ambled toward the lake and Ed and I motorbiked to the farmhouse, As if wanting more of a summer night, Ed reached for the “best Dutch movie ever” (borrowed from the library) and slipped it just before midnight into the DVD player.

And even though it was Dutch and with subtitles and on a tiny TV, we were riveted.  And surprised at how long the movie was. By 2:30 it came to a climatic ending, but we hadn’t had enough and so we watched a good portion all over again, with a voice-over of the director’s comments.

And so it would have been wonderful to sleep in beyond the usual early farmhouse hours the next morning, except we couldn't do it – not with the sunlight pouring in through the eastern skylight. We need a shade – Ed tells me.

We motorbike over to Shopko for a pair of tension rods, past fields of market crops and meadows of prairie flowers.





There is a sale of very sad looking end-of-season plants at Shopko and we rescue them, as many as we can fit for the ride back to the farmhouse. Curtain rods, white pines, black eyed Susans, shrubs without names – some now on my lap, others snugly tucked in the crate in back of the motorbike.

And so we have a busy morning.

My daughters came for a porch brunch – oyster mushroom and corn frittata – and you could say it is a celebratory brunch, or at least a pre-celebratory brunch because tomorrow, my older girl turns thirty. We believe in dragging out  celebrations for as long as we can.










She had tossed around a number of ways to migrate jubilantly into life's fourth decade and in the end decided to go down for the big day itself to Chicago, where she has both family and friends. We eat our eggs and yesterday's ice cream too and then we all pile into the bus that takes us down to the city that is just a short three hours south of the farmette.


And so now  it is Sunday evening and we are in Chicago – an urban break for me...


 


...one that feels good, so good, eating dinner in the golden light of a perfect summer evening...


 



...a perfect city summer evening, all the more perfect because I know that in a day or so, I'll be returning to the quiet of the fields and meadows that I have surrounding me back home at the farmette.