Tuesday with Polish friends

My attention is split today between the farmette and Warsaw. Perhaps not in terms of hours spent planted there, across the ocean (I did not travel to Warsaw!), but surely in terms of thoughts processed and words spoken. 

I talked about traveling to the homeland with my doc this morning. (She is contemplating such a trip to her own homeland.)

I spoke as well to my Polish friends on a Zoom call, reviewing some of the events I had described in Like a Swallow. (They have been enthusiastic about the content, which is very sweet and very gratifying. After all, they lived those same years in that same Warsaw that I describe in the book.) We rarely go back in time, but the book allowed us to open some of those doors long closed -- a wonderful unanticipated consequence of putting something out for others to read.

And I thought about how history is painting events in this country and how it had painted events in Poland in the years I lived there and in the years that followed.

I had plenty of time for all this thinking, because the day was once again beautiful, but also dry. It was time to water the lavender. 

Oh, hello, Bresse hen! Are we really going to butcher you for a Sunday meal? Somehow this is feeling more and more remote. These four gentle hens are awfully sweet...

I give a quick glance at the flower tubs (oh, hi Henny!)

And at the sunflower that's growing (and growing and growing)...

And then I attend to my appointments and since I am out and about, I may as well stop by a bakery. For breakfast breads. Delicious!

In the late afternoon I pick up Snowdrop at robot camp. (She reports that each class has exactly one girl in it.) We don't have much time, but I bring her to the farmhouse anyway. Someone needs to pick the cherries! (We do not lack the cherries.)

For her, the farmette is a place of quiet  (no little brothers around, and a set of pretty quiet grandparents). I'm not sure she would appreciate a steady diet of quiet, but in small chunks, it suits her really well. 

And as she plays, I think to myself -- when did I become this quiet? Is it the Ed effect? Or is it that I have listened enough in my life to know that so many things are better left unsaid? Thoughts fare better when given space and time to simmer before served out on a plate for others to hear. Or maybe it's because I had a father who liked to expound and you know how that goes -- the next generation always wants to be different than the one before it.

When I was a nanny for the child of a prominent New York couple (read about it in Like a Swallow!), I learned how to do small talk very well. Put in a room full of "Very Important People," I could weave my way conversationally through sometimes tricky situations. At the same time, in the course of my life, I've met too many who just don't know when to stop a story. These days, if I have to pick one -- grab the stage or stay at the side of the conversation, I'll almost always pick the latter. 

Evening? I cook up soup which perhaps is not right for a warm summer evening, but still, I have rainbow chard and beet stems and a soup is an easy way to dispose of both. Besides, Polish people really love to eat soup. (We eat dinner on the porch, it's that beautiful outside!)

Wait, am I still Polish? Yeah... I think that designation will stay with me. Rainbow chard American, with a good chunk of beet Polish in me. For life.