surprised

It's very hard to surprise someone who is part of your family but lives with her own family, even as you see her practically every day. Things slip out. Like for example your sweetie will say something inadvertently revealing. Or, you will send a text confirming something to the wrong person. You then have to lie your way out of that one. Or her kids will find something in your house that's supposed to be part of the surprise. I mean, how many ways can you accidentally spill the beans on a surprise? In the end though, I think we pulled it off! We surprised her! Here's what happened:

The Chicago portion of the family wanted to do something special for my Madison daughter this weekend. The idea formed that they should  show up unexpectedly for a birthday dinner with her (she turns forty Sunday). Great plan! Then came the practicalities. My birthday girl is expecting a farmhouse meal today. Sunday evening is booked with another event. Too, the kids are bad secret keepers. And, of course, there's Covid, so we have to plan carefully. Outside eating only. People have vulnerabilities and there are kids.

We arranged it all: the dinner, the cake, the brunch the next day. Lots to do in preparation for the arrival of the Chicagoan tribe. And of course there are the gifts, the flowers, the brunch foods. Then my birthday girl, innocently unaware of all this, tells me she'd love to go to the pool on Saturday. Just me and her and the kids.

Gulp! Well okay! I can do that! Clean garden very early, do market, rush to pool. Come home, possibly with a kid in tow, feed lunch, drive child home so that I can, behind their backs, run for the cake (it's being baked elsewhere), decorate it, and clean up the house for soon to be visiting younger daughter and family. Phew! So far so good!

And then comes the big moment where my son-in-law drives the birthday family ostensibly to the farmhouse, but then he veers off to the restaurant where we all shout -- Surprise!

She was genuinely surprised. Shocked actually. And it was a beautiful evening! At Quivey's Grove, where we used to go for special dinners many, many years (decades?) ago, when it used to be "in the country." Now it's flanked by superhighways and strip malls, but the space is still very large and very green. Day one of a weekend of celebrations! Photos will help put color and texture to the day:

 

1. morning garden clean up. The tall lilies alone generate some 40 or 50 blooms each day. Snip, snip, clip, snip!

Somewhere in this pot of herbs and nasturtium, there is a strawberry plant with a ripening strawberry. See it? What are the chances that a cheeper wont find it? None.

 

 

 

Waiting... She's not in any hurry!

 

 

 

Definitely a late summer display:

 

 

 

Only in nature do purple and pink go so well together with red and orange!

 

 

 

The Big Bed: still a canvas of color, albeit a more delicate painting now...

 

 

 

2. Breakfast: Ed! Get down here!

Watching the monarchs over breakfast...

3. To market: those two bouquets are going home with me!

4. The Goodman pool: So empty today...

5. Can I come to the farmhouse for lunch? Sure you can!

 

 

 

6. Cake: pick up at bakery, decorate at the farmhouse. My pansies are edible! The kids sampled them earlier. Snowdrop said they taste like asparagus!

 

 

7. The arrival of the Chicago young family: they come to the farmhouse before we all head out for dinner.

 

 

 

 Leaving for Quivey's Grove...

 

 

8.  At the restaurant: waiting for the arrival of the soon to be surprised birthday girl. Shirley Temple cocktail anyone?

 

They're here! Stunned at this turn of events! Hey, Shirley Temple cocktail, anyone?

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a large field by our table. Could it be more perfect for the kids?

 

 

 

But of course, the birthday dinner is the main attraction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...

 

 

 Happy birthday dear older daughter...

Happy birthday to you...

 

I always said that birthdays create opportunities for us to let go of the everyday for just a little bit and take stock of the extraordinary, the wonderful stuff in our lives. Both young families here for the birthday weekend is nothing short of sublime. Happy birthday celebrations to us all, happy birthday (well, tomorrow!) to the amazing daughter who started it all -- family life, played out over four decades of beautiful adventures!

With love indeed...

Friday quiet

Ed went from being somewhat preoccupied with his machining projects and oversights to being consumed by them. I keep tabs on all angles of his work, because it's all interesting, and he's interesting, and because it is all outside my comfort zone, so that I consider it to be an education in how things work in the real world. Still, his days are abuzz with activity right now. So much so that he was up at dawn and out of the house (on a mission!) before I even began weighing the hefty question of whether it was time to feed the animals already.

Since he was away for a good chunk of the day, I decided to act like a July gardener rather than a September gardener. None of this "meh, why bother weeding" stuff! Lets get out the clippers and cut spent flowers and pull at least some of those weeds out. Oh, and while I'm at it, there's hand mowing that needs to be done. Normally I'd offload that to Ed, but like I said, the guy's preoccupied.

So I worked. All morning I worked. Most of the afternoon I worked.

We're moving into that phase where beauty lies not necessarily in the abundance of blooms, but in the juxtaposition of, say, a small handful of blooms against a mixed canopy of foliage and a few lingering flowers. So it's different, but equally lovely and compelling. See if you agree:

(these are "autumn" lilies, so I guess we're into autumn now!)

(where will the froggies go after the lilies are done for the year?)

(Happy, always the easiest to photograph because he stands still!)

(Cherry, the jumper! With wing assist.)

Breakfast, by the way, was at noon, on the porch, alone. A rare thing!

Eventually I do think about dinner, though there's not much to mull over. It's obvious I should do a frittata. We are awash with eggs and with veggies and mixing the two is just so delicious! Today I'm reaching for green beans, corn and mushrooms. And a few leftover broccoli flowerettes. And I'm using the tiny eggs of our youngest cheepers, so twelve instead of the usual eight. (We eat the frittata over two days.) Since I like putting most of the shredded cheese on top (most others would throw a big portion of it into the egg mixture), all my frittatas tend to look the same at the finish line. So let me toss in a photo of it when it's still not cooked and before the cheese goes on!

It's my last photo for the day. And just to let you know, I have a busy weekend ahead. Sane people would put aside blogging when days and especially evenings fill up with activity, but I have long abandoned sanity in favor of daily posting, so you'll get something here, even though I'm not sure what!

The evening is cool, the air quality -- well, a bit hazy from the western fires, but honestly, here, at the farmhouse we are feeling enormously lucky.

A good night to all!

With love...

storms

I did not bother going upstairs at midnight. There were to be storms with hurricane force winds. We have a couple of tall thin pines out front that could well snap in a storm and though they don't seem to be pointing in the direction of the farmhouse, you never know. When things start swaying and shaking out there, I like to be far from whatever might hit the roof.

Within an hour, the sirens began their wail and a merely heavy storm suddenly turned into a tornado warning. 

We were at the western edge of the trouble spots. What to do? Well, sirens really do mean basement time, but our basement is unfinished and dusty and not fit for human habitation so I usually opt to hunker down in the corner of the mudroom. If the house were to be ripped up and carried away, like, say, in the Wizard of Oz, then the mud room wouldn't protect me, but the corner of it is windowless and has a door leading to the basement just in case things got really violent, so I see it as a good compromise. 

Ed gauged the risk to be small (he said the winds didn't sound strong enough) and the inconvenience to be large and so he stayed put. I know, I know, you could raise good counter arguments, but, I suppose probabilities were on his side so there's that.

In my mudroom enclave it was anything but cozy so I moved in a kitchen rug and tried to make do with that. Nope. Not good enough. Next, I carried down a sleeping bag and a pillow, thinking I could at least rest. Nope, couldn't rest. And then Ed let the cats in (they are scarred! they have the sheep shed, get them out of here!) and the cats thought my resting in the mudroom was very very strange, so yes, Ed did finally chase them out of the house and by that time the tornado warning was over.

I got very little sleep last night.

This morning, we noted a half an inch of rain in our measuring cup. The air improved, from 97% humidity levels last night to something more summer normal this morning. I found it easy to work in the garden, even though my motivation is slowly (maybe not so slowly) diminishing. I only snip lily heads visible to "an average passerby" (even though there are no passerby types, average or otherwise, passing through here ever).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An hour into it I consider myself done. Breakfast!

And as I sit there thinking how absolutely delicious that milky coffee is, the kids arrive!

(purple on purple)

 

 

 

 

 

I'd say we concentrate on three things: sampling flowers, reading books and doing art. Oh, and eating fruit, but that goes without saying. It's a gaga thing.

(What? Sampling flowers? As in tasting them?? The answer is yes. We have some edible flowers in the yard and the kids were checking out the flavors!)

 

 

(We did also admire stuff without ingesting it!)

 

 

(When I return the kids home, I check in on Sandpiper. Nope, not awake at the moment!)

And in the afternoon? Market time! For the cheese-egg exchange. For checking on what's growing these days.

One last item on the agenda: garlic harvest! We'd started growing garlic by accident. Somehow a bulb got planted. And within a couple of years, we seemed to have a patch, right in front of the lily bed. Lately, we've been much more deliberate about it: we harvest, we cure it, we plant cloves from the biggest heads. Today was harvest time!

In the evening I feel I could fall asleep early, no problem, but the Olympics are on and the air feels good and the mood is gentle and sweet. We hang out on the couch. Our beloved purchased on Craigslist four years ago couch. So much better than the floor in the mudroom! No, no storms tonight. Just a moon out there, shining down brightly on us all.

sandwich

In the middle of the night, lightening took over the skies. Thunder claps followed, but really, it was the lightening that made me turn on the bedroom lamp and give up on sleep for a while. I'm not a sound enough sleeper to withstand someone shining powerful fog lights in my face, nor can I sleep through a chain of lightening flashes turning the night into a Halloween spectacle. So I stayed up and waited and eventually the skies settled and I settled and Ed came up and soon enough it was morning. 

I almost sprinted in my eagerness to see what the storms had delivered! And what a disappointment! Less than a quarter of an inch of rain in our measuring cup. Really?? After all that flashing we got just a trickle of wetness in the garden? Now that's just plain frustrating. 

The rain must have come on with some strength though because many of the phlox blooms were knocked off the stems. It's bound to happen now. The flowers are transitioning to late summer. Still ravishingly beautiful, but more fragile now.

(late summer colors)

(very unusual for me color choices...)

Breakfast on the porch. 

And now what? No kids today, no real motivation to work much in the garden. An hour, maybe hour and a half and that's it. I no longer pay attention to detail. It's like the farmer who complained in a recent email newsletter that in spring, every weed mattered and now, a whole field can be taken over by weeds and you shrug it off. 

I spend a good many hours in my Adirondack on the porch, writing. Not the finished text -- I'm done with that for now, but something else. I'm experimenting with a new idea. We'll see where it goes.

But honestly, the day feels like the insides of a sandwich, the cheese or salami that's stuck between two pieces of stormy bread: we had one slice of storms last night and we're getting the second, possibly more violent storms tonight. In between, the air is warm and humid and we can't wait until the whole bit -- the whole sandwich of bad weather -- is done with. 

In the evening we move the cars from their parking space underneath the big willow. Those branches can come crashing down if the winds gust as fiercely as they're predicting.  And then I cook up some soup. I know, you're thinking that's really a weird choice for a hot muggy day. But my CSA farmers (Tipi Produce) suggested a recipe for all that corn and green beans and zucchini and I think it's a good one and it really is perfect for late July or August, because of the absolutely sublime corn: cut off the kernels and boil the cobs (with smashed garlic) to make corn stock. Then, it's the normal soup procedure. Sautee onion, add chopped green beans, then zucchini, then corn, herbs and broth. And a few chick peas! Cook it up, squeeze in some lemon juice and sprinkle some parmesan. Thank you, farmers. It's delicious!

Okay, it's back to storm tracking for me. Let's keep the roof on the house tonight, okay? We would so appreciate it!