food and words

I vow that I will never take my camera on my daily run to the grocery store again. What’s the point?

It’s an acknowledgement of failure: today, I did nothing more photographically interesting than this: I made my way over to Whole Foods and back.

True, I am in that bubble that puffs first weeks of pretty much anything into greatness. First week of school, of a relationship, of parenting. Oh, now, wait. The first week of parenting was godawful. Didn’t know what I was doing, but whatever it was, it was wrong. The remaining years? Bliss.

That’s the exception. Ususally the beginning is better than the middle and most certainly far more exhilarating than the bitter end. No, no, quit thinking I hate the AARP years (I’m eligible!), I just like the first week of school better than the last one. And the first one of “serious” writing is far far more exciting than the subsequent ones, when I will likely stare at the screen and think bitter thoughts about my life.

So I am on a writing high. It won’t always be thus. (Truthfully, I am thrilled.)

For you, here on Ocean, I have an insignificant photo taken from the driver’s seat (the sky was dramatic, as was photographing it in the midst of horribly impatient traffic), on my way to Whole Foods. There you have it – my day, composed of many hours by my Toshi (doesn't everyone name their computer?) and a handful of minutes in the pursuit of food.

cheer up

For those who feel hopelessly slapped down by the weather, I’m with you.

But not really. Rainy days conjure up for me images of desolate beaches and battered cottages where a lightbulb burns late into the night and a crazed writer plunks down another paragraph and then another.

So, in other words, go write a book.

In the alternative, stare at this for a while. It’s been my blast of sunshine for a several days now.

storms

All night long the sky flashed and the rain hit upon my upturned window. You’d think I’d get up and close it. You’d think.

I had maybe two dozen bursts of sleep, but each fizzled as the sky crashed outside. Like intermittent love, this was torture that messed with you in the worst way: just when you thought all was good, all was calm, the noise and fury would shake you up again. And again. And there was nothing you could do but hope that this was the last time.

By morning, I wanted to call my friend up in St. Paul and tell her to stay home and not visit as planned. This was an act of kindness on my part, since I want to see her. But a drive down in this hateful weather? Too much.

But she had left already, crawling her way through downpours and cloudbursts and every conceivable Midwestern form of rain.

My occasional traveling companion Ed called for an assist – his little red-with-a-washed-out-pink-stripe ‘93 Geo (which some would regard as too good for the junk pile, but he would see as the best form of locomotion this side of the Atlantic) refused to start.

Storms outside disturb the balance within and thus for some asinine reason I found it absolutely necessary to use this moment to list for Ed all improvements we should be making in our lives, over and beyond helping each other jumpstart cars. Amen.

Surely fighting words.

Needless to say, the attempt to inspire us onto paths of greatness failed, which only goes to show that stormy days and nights rarely provide opportunities for enlightened thought and reasoned discourse. They won’t even let you run through a full cycle of sleep, for God’s sake.

Once Ed’s car was up and running, I waved a less than cheerful good bye and made my way to Whole Foods. It is destined to be a one photo kind of day and so I'm leaving you with the best of the day thus far: wet organic basil, standing bravely on wet crates.

rain

Left a daughter in Chicago, returned home. It’s that simple. One day, we sit across the table, both daughters and I and we pass a jug of milk – one puts it on her cereal, one drinks it straight up, one, me actually, splashes it into her coffee – the next day they’re gone and the milk stays inside the fridge and rots. (I don’t use enough to justify the jug.)

The rain is now saturating the landscape. Everywhere. It’s gray and misty and dreary and cold. If I had been condo shopping on a day like this I would have said – forget it! This place is too dark. Except every place is too dark because all of Madison is too dark and you know what? That’s just not a healthy way to be in the weeks just preceding the summer’s end.

And so I write. And I am grateful to all you commenters who said nice things about this enormous project of mine and especially those of you who have vowed to purchase a copy and yes, there will be a copy, only not tomorrow or the next day.

For now, a photo of the final stage of the drive in. See? It’s pretty here, just outside of Madison. Even when the rain falls steadily, with no signs of letting up.

it’s a dog’s world

Really it is. Really truly.

But, I started today. Let it be noted: I finally started work on the ungreat un-American unnovel.

Fifty years from now, when it is finally published, posthumously, you all buy it, right?

Thanks.

long day

No pauses. Work, then a spin down to Chicago for a couple of nights. Traffic. Three double espressos today and still, all I can think of is sleep.

A good meal – I stay awake for that. Il Fiasco, just around the corner. Yes, that is the name and yes, it is good.

A blur of black and white tiles and black and white clothed waiters. A bite of this, of that. Mmm, tasty. Mmmm, sleepy. Poached pears and gorgonzola soufflé. Nice. Staying awake now, for that last bite of chocolate smething or other.

Long day.



Il Fiasco waitstaff



poached pears, gorgonzola soufflé

red

Finally, it rained. So, that’s what it will be like in a month – wet and cold again. And then colder.

I am on the Square to get a sandwich at Café Soleil. The irony of it.

It is a sacred little spot, full of history. Of warm promises. With fresh and honest everything, set against images of farmland and dill flowers. A place of daydreams.





I leave with my brown paper bag, thinking of the Farmer John’s provolone sandwich with apples, pesto mayo and spinach leaves (that one is for someone else) and the chocolate sand cookie with crystals of salt on top (that one is for me).

The Capitol Square is empty. Almost empty.






I take the sandwich home. Home is warm, home is red and brown and golden too. I’ve given up on yellow and blue. Those are Mediterranean colors. In Wisconsin I need red and brown and golden to get me through the grays and blues of the very long winter.

eating habits

What can I say, it's peculiar. The way we eat, what we eat.

Particularly those who eat upside down, clinging with rear quarters to a tree trunk.

shades

Moving from computer to book to computer, but physically not moving much at all. This often describes my work at home days.

By late afternoon I want that sun on my back and so I walk over for an espresso at the second closest café, the one at Borders.

I approach it from the back, by the railway tracks. So empty here! Where are people? In cars? Indoors? But look how pretty even this very indifferent street corner is!














To the left, to the right, and looking up, it’s all so multi-toned. When we were studying for the bac in Poland, at the end of high school, the teachers said to us -- take the time to refresh and calm your minds. Go look at green things!

And now in Madison, I am again looking at green things. It was easy in Warsaw (the parks!). It’s easy here, too.

But where is everyone?

I go to the Borders Café. If you’re looking for the men of Madison, they appear to be right here:





The women? Maybe like in southern Europe, when they are not working, they are hidden within a dense fabric of family life. Maybe. Or, it's all chance and happenstance. Yeah, chance and happenstance.

café life

A scorcher today. The kind of day where you stay indoors and praise air conditioning (not me, but I can understand the need today). Café tables stand empty outside. Who wants more pan-fired air on a day that already feels over the top… (Me.)

I walked to the farthest grocery store, remembering decades of walking to grocery stores (before I moved to the States, to Wisconsin) and I taddled between the shade and sunlight, liking one and then the other and wondering why there was no one, no one on the sidewalk, beside me.

Toward the end, I stopped at the café closest to my home (Sundance 608) and I just could not understand why it was the way it was: a line of solo café habitués, doing their own thing, saying nothing, listening to no one.





I took my double shot of espresso with a splash of the white stuff and left quickly.

challenge

Okay, Nina. No more random Saturday market shots. Get a theme. Get a life.

How about this: take photos only of vendors where you buy something and post a photo from each such vendor?

Good challenge.

But, I fail. Pride keeps me from posting a photo from every place of purchase. The “tart lady” (with the heavenly cherry rose cakes) threw me. It is a non-salvageable photo and I absolutely refuse to put it up on flickr, let alone on Ocean. And the photos went mostly downhill from there.

Still, the first part of the challenge is a success. So, here are some of the places where I spent money today (first four: Westside Community Market; next one: Farmers Market on the Square; finally: Unearthed – not a market exactly, but a place where you can pick up old, decoratively restored implements from farms, villages and towns of the Midwest):



edamame bunches




all green




heirlooms and mushrooms




for my table




at the root of things




new use for old nozzles

zucchini pies

Preoccupied with making grilled zucchini pizza pies. With lots of olive oil, garlic and fresh oregano. To chase away evil spirits.

See you tomorrow.

around the lake in 180 minutes

The few times I have been out on Lake Mendota (Madison’s big one) I have regretted it.

The first time, on a kayak, I could not make the damn thing head back against the wind. I was out with my daughter and I thought hard about what punishment should befall me for putting her in danger.

The second time it was with neighbors, on their pontoon. I’m not really sure if it was an honest to goodness pontoon. The thing moved slowly and we drank beer and it was all fun and games until The Storm rolled in and we had to do an emergency bailout by the Union because the waves got to be so overwhelming.

The third time was in a sailboat. It was a group sailing lesson. Two years ago, as I recall. After the first hour I curled up in the belly of the boat (I’m sure it has a different name: everything on a sailboat has a complicated name and you are a total failure if you cannot remember any of it – lives depend on it, I am told). Lying there, I wanted to die. It was a passing thought, but still, you see the pattern here.

Yesterday was my fourth try. On a boat called the Betty Lou. Really.

Initially, the signs were not good. The sky looked dark. The water looked dark.




…the waters got rough.

But, this boat had a belly that held two cheerful mates and they handed out drinks and foods in great quantities and the captain assured us that the storms would not hit before we returned to shore. I was greatly reassured.

It took three hours to spin around the lake. Mostly, views from boat to shore are very ho hum in terms of photography, but with an ever changing sky and a setting sun, you can really get enthralled by it all.









So the fourth’s a charm. By the end of the evening, I was telling Polish proverb stories and I only tell those if I am completely content, so there you have it.

beats me where the time goes

beets: Wednesday Hilldale Farmers Market

life and art

Over coffee on State Street, we talked about art. At least, I interpreted everything through the lens of art, or people engaging in art, or, more precisely, people allowing their own art to flow.

It is the kind of conversation that you can have when you’re not worried about something hugely more important – as in your kids getting to their orchestra rehearsal on time, or your own employability.

Or maybe it is all hugely important and we just don’t understand this early enough, when we can still do something about it. Like go paint a canvas, or write a memoir.

It was just an idle conversation. I did not immediately get out my paintbrush afterwards. That would have been foolish.

But I did take stock. There in that coffee shop, where students look like the murals on the walls and the murals on the walls look like Italian frescoes and none of it is genuine but all is calm and, in fact, quite beautiful.



two pairs of sandals and two books



three coffee cups

a musing

Should you be scared of hornets? Wasps?

Even if their bite has no punch to it? No substance?

Reading a quite lovely morning post on Ann’s blog today and then the comments that followed made me wonder about this.

And wouldn't you know it! Today, I came across this:





Harmless, unless you get too close.

return

I thought long and hard about what should be included in today’s post.

On the surface, posting would have to be counted as easy: I was in Chicago for the day.





I even met a young couple who had set up shop baking the most exquisite pastries. They're from Palermo, in Sicily. With a story. Just not my story.





But in fact, I had only three things on my mind and they were not the buildings of Chicago, nor the Pasticceria Natalina.

I was preoccupied with saying goodbye to daughters (especially the one who was heading back East)…





..and with returning home, on the road that I know better than any other – I 90 – winding its misty, rainy way back to Madison...





I did make a brief stop at Ed’s farmette, to see how the rains had benefited the plant life out there. Indeed, things were looking good.





(That's two. The third? It's just one of those things.)

And so I came home.

market watch

I like movement. My own, sure, but also of those around me. Man, watch her navigate that street! Look at that guy push his way to the front!

Markets are the best for this. No one is still, life is not boring.

For a farmer, I suppose selling food is almost restful. Compared to planting, tilling, reaping, this is easy stuff.

For me (and yes, I have said this before, numerous times), there’s something immensely beautiful in that final act of presenting the produce. Here it is, I'm showing it off for you, the best of the best.






Just a few photos today. My daughters are distracting me (in the best ways!) and so I’m hardly remembering that I have a camera banging my hip during the market runs. The one above and the next two down are from the Westside Community Market and the last two are from the Farmers’ Market on the Square. All are of women farmers, or their daughters. A coincidence? Possibly. Or could it be that they struck me as especially beautiful this week, the week of daughters?

a thousand bugs

I am a newcomer to Wisconsin. Barely twenty-five years old. A babe. Newly partnered. Married even. Still working on my dissertation (never to finish working on my dissertation, but I do not know this at the time).

We are renting an apartment just at the edge of west Madison. Cornfields outside. (These days there are endless suburban homes growing in the once fertile corn soil.)

It’s August. Watch that corn grow!

The night is warm. We’re young, we stay out later than one would now.

But eventually we roll back to our wee little apartment, with the view of endless sky.

Turn key in lock, open door, look up. A million bugs cover the ceiling. Grain gnats, I call them, but who know what they are. They moved in by way of the small openings in the screen. This is their home. I am the outsider.


Almost thirty years have passed since that day with the bugs.

I am in my condo now.





Daughters, born, schooled, departed, are now back home on a brief visit.

The condo is almost finished. Almost almost. But there are no screens on my large glass doors.

Night is cool, the sound of crickets is so enticing. I crack the door to the fantastic balcony and doze.

Near midnight, I wake up. A thousand, no, a million bugs cover the spotlighted ceiling. Baby mosquitoes? Flies? Who are you? What are you doing here?

I’m not proud of swatting them, but swat I do. For hours. I knock down and break things (good bye ceramic woman of Russia), I wipe up bug corpses, I leave splotches on the freshly painted ceiling and walls.

Mosquitoes, flies, grain gnats. There is no such thing as a pristine wall, a clean slate, an untarnished surface. Not for long, anyway.

Of course, I can just keep the glass door closed after the sun sets...

friends and lovers

Biking to work. Hot, hot now, to the point that grasses appear permanently stuck in ther yellowness.

Pause by the lake. France? No, Madison.





After teaching, I’m there again, by the lake. Looking at the familiar Madison Union Terrace tables and chairs. And people, engrossed in each other (can’t be the food) leaning into them, right there, by the water.





Pick up a box (okay, four boxes) of sushi in the early evening and head west, to Spring Green. American Players Theater – we have been going there for years. And years. (Remind you of Central Park’s outdoor theater?)

Two people (each with white hair) walk down to the stage. They hold hands.





The show starts. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Why hadn’t I ever noticed how mean Claudio is to his beloved? I notice now. Her tears, her frustration.

We drive back in that familiar string of returning cars. In the forty minute ride back to town, the ipod is plugged into the ancient tape recorder of the car and familiar stuff comes on. We’re used to singing together, daughters and I.

Such a bright moon ahead, just over the road.

For I can’t help, falling in love with you...