A very warm week, coming up! Typically by September I'm ready for crispy, brisk fall days, but this year, I'm less enthusiastic about letting go of summer. It's because of the roses. Many of them still have a period of bloom before them and yes, I have a couple more to put in -- defoliated twigs actually -- and the later that crispy brisk air sets in, the more chance there is of my catching a bloom this year. Too, I love going out with Millie in the same old shorts and a t-shirt. So quick and easy. Add a light caress from a summer wind on bare skin and I have myself a recipe for contentment.
I cut a few blooms (short but pretty) for the breakfast table, feeling so privileged to be able to do this. Hard to accept that in winter, I'll be relegated to grocery store flowers again. [No, I absolutely cannot afford flower subscriptions, even though I love studying them online and imagining which would look best on the counter at Steffi's House. Lately, I've studied the nursery bouquets at Grace Rose Farm. Plenty of the pastels I love! So gorgeous, but of course, even if I were rich, it's hard to justify shipping fresh bouquets of flowers to your doorstep all winter long. They are beautiful but short-lived. After five days, looking at their wilted heads, you have to wonder what possessed you to do this.
I never was a rose lover. Not until this year. I liked their fragrance of course, and I did try growing a floribunda and a climber in one of my past gardens, but I never really understood them, nor did I want to treat them with kid gloves and horticultural fungus oils. And those trellises and pergolas displayed in photos of rose gardens? That was, in my limited view, for the fanatics. When I thought about roses, I mainly imagined blooms such as you find at the florist or grocery store, especially around Valentine's Day.
But of course, that's just closed mindedness on my part. The world of rose growing has evolved, and my thinking about them thankfully has evolved as well.
However, embarking on something new means that you have a steep learning curve, with plenty of opportunity for making costly mistakes. For example, the first roses I bought this year (a tree and a bush) came from a place that is... shady. Massive nursery stock sold cheaply. Concepts like disease resistance, own root-stock, one year old or three year old, training climbers, thorns that will kill you if you come near the stems -- zi never considered any of that.
All this to say that following breakfast (on the porch, with a sampler of rose blooms from my garden)...
Millie and I went out to her yard and she played and I sat down on my wonderful bench and studied the roses. I located the trouble areas (leaves with black spots should be removed, spent buds should be clipped, etc), and eventually I tended to them. I also located a good spot for the next and probably last rose I want to place in Millie's Yard and dug out some of the turf and top "soil" to make room for it. But really, the most productive thing for me was the study of the roses. To look admiringly but also critically at what I planted where and what should be done about it.
(look who has been hanging around my roses! straight from the lily fields of the farmette!)
(from the bench...)
Ed called while I was in the thick of rose contemplation and asked if I would go with him on a bike ride to McFarland (the town across Lake Waubesa) for a coffee/lunch at Grace Cafe there. He picked this ride deliberately because he knows how much I love it. It's not hard. Just 45 minutes each way. Not too many hills, lots of variety in the landscape...
And at the end, we have the coffee shop.
The outing feels exhilarating and at the same time intimate. The wind going there is on our backs -- a stiff breeze that has the windsurfers flying across the lake...
Biking with Ed across the mile long bridge is always joyful.
At the coffee shop, we often sit and read -- I always bring my book with me -- but today we talk. Inevitably, we turn to the subject of my sick friend, but after a half hour of updates and speculations, he suggests we put it to rest. We talk about the Ukraine war instead, which is ofcourse even more depressing, but we take it from the angle of technological innovation -- something that allows us not to focus for just a minute not on the horrors of that war, but instead, on the way that despite everything, the Ukraine, with the help from the west, has managed to develop useful technologies both for the war effort and for use outside the war zone. Think pizza delivery by drones, coming to your door next year.
After a solid hour of this, I reluctantly suggest we head back. Millie has been in her crate for a while now, and even more importantly, there appear to be storm clouds in the west. (Did you ever wonder how it is that stormy skies never sidestep you or go in another direction but instead always, always come straight at you?)
I pedal at top speed. Nothing like a storm to get me to work hard on that bike. A 45 minute ride turns into a 30 minute ride. And I can't help but remember all those bike trips I took as a kid, spending summers in the Polish village with my grandmother. The storms would come suddenly and they would terrify me. It felt like the next bolt of lightening would target me. Trees were suddenly my enemies (they attracted lightening!), but open fields were worse -- they offered no protection at all.
We got wet, but of course, we were perfectly safe. And at my age, reason took charge. No, lightening would not seek me out and in the one in a million chance that it did, well, I'm 73 and I lived a good life! When you're biking, your thoughts are often not very complicated (though Ed swears it's the opposite -- for him, deep contemplation is best achieved when he is speeding on a bike).
Home is all about Millie: brushing her, keeping her quiet, taking her out again and again. She is still such a puppy!
No family Sunday dinner today. We're still working on schedules for the fall semester and I dont know that me cooking dinner for the young family on Sundays is part of the grand plan. And so I have a quiet evening. Well, Millie is a little hyped up. Must be the changes in the weather. They say dogs can detect and are affected by fluctuations in weather patterns -- drops in pressure, the coming of a rain. Millie has had a lot to work with in that arena today!
with so much love...
