Saturday

Happy Fall to all you northerners (and happy spring to you down there, in the south)!

Oh, that smell of autumn... No other season brings with it such a pungent air. A smell of wet leaves and spent plant life. Of forest bark and mushrooms. Of nasturtium, dahlia, and sunflower heads -- the ones that are still blooming and the ones that are not. Step outside on a summer morning and inhale. We are so small, nature's reign is so vast...

(bike ride snapshot)

Ed is up before me. This happens maybe once a season and today is that rare day. When I come down (almost always around 7), he has already fed the animals. I order bakery items online and then we get on our bikes.

To market!

I cant say that we buy much. Carrots. Flowers. Some pesto for my daughter. We have plenty of corn and the farmette is still churning out lots of melons, watermelons and tomatoes. So we pick up the essentials...

... then bike to Madison Sourdough, for today's breakfast treat (an almond croissant), for a loaf of sourdough bread, and for croissants for the kids for the week.

Roundtrip, it's a two hour ride for us. With pauses and purchases. The day is perfectly warm (meaning not too warm). And that fragrance! Your olfactory sensory neurons are working in overdrive!

Breakfast on this first autumn day is on the porch. Heaven...

Of course, I weed. I have to get those beds cleared the next few days, or else I'm not the garden person I set out to be here, at the farmette. 

I weed hard. Many buckets -- thousands? millions? Dig, shake free of soil, dump. Over and over and over again. It's shocking how well the weeds grew given our drought this summer.

I was reminded of a story I heard on NPR last night -- about the runner Clarence DeMar from New Hampshire, who won the Boston Marathon in the early 20th century (the story is here). Over and over again. He was the first to demonstrate that extreme exercise can indeed be good for you and not wear out your body. The caveat -- it comes with side effects. Though I never trained for, or ran a marathon, I know those side effects well -- I got them for the first time when I was in my late 30s and took a saw to the thick limbs of a maple tree in the back yard. My PT person from this spring would say that I exceeded my therapeutic window! 

Today, I think I may have just hit the outer edges of that therapeutic window again. In other words, I worked hard and this after my smart watch rings had already closed from the long bike ride. 

Wait, is this what you call a restful weekend??

I think so. When I work, my mind floats from one idea to the next, processing old information, incorporating new stuff. Even as my hands and back work to the max, my head stays nimbly centered and whatever is going on inside there is calming. Exasperations with the world and some people in it mellow. Peace is restored.

But oh, does the body feel the toil of those long hours in the yard!

If we had a bathtub in the farmhouse this is the one time when I would use it, though I suppose there's a risk I'd doze off in the sheer comfort of floating in warm water.

In the alternative, I fix dinner and Ed and I turn on the next in a series of PBS shows we can watch -- Professor T. Sure, there are the dead bodies, but remarkably, each episode concludes with justice prevailing -- a good message for the end of an incredibly full (of weeds) day.

with love...