it's Friday...

Restless nights don't always lead to restless days but they surely increase the likelihood of an appearance of one. A further contributing factor (to a restless day) may be to have scheduled for it yet another visit with the endodontist (the same one who last week retreated a root canal for me).

But first, before all this, there is breakfast -- that wonderful meal that this morning required a jacket. It was that cool. (For me, not for Ed.)





The endodontist -- an incredibly talented and wise man, has seen far too much of me lately, especially since the last half dozen visits have been freebies. (He feels compelled to fix this tooth at the set initial price, even though we've gone mountains over that piddly first set of hours.)

Well now, if you come here this often, we'll run out of family milestones to talk about. I already know about your daughter's wedding and your older girl's pregnancy -- he smiles, but not very broadly.
Let's try a different topic -- how's your weekend shaping up?
I think about how I should answer this. I don't really have a week-end anymore. The only thing that makes a weekend a weekend is that my older girl and her husband typically come over for supper on Sunday. So I know then that it's a Sunday.

The endodontist comments -- reminds me of my friend who just retired. His wife asks him -- what are going to do today and he pauses and answers -- nothing. And she asks him -- so what are you going to do tomorrow and he answers -- I haven't finished doing nothing today yet!

I laugh, but were I not with all forms of paraphernalia in my mouth I'd explain that it isn't really like that. I do have things on my plate and each day I make small progress and get closer to picking them up again. It would help if I didn't have to spend so many mornings at the endodontist -- I want to say.


After, I do the weekly grocery shopping and by the time that's behind me -- boom! It's afternoon.

I water the garden contemplatively, thinking about whether I should put the motor on and get to my projects.

And I decide I'm going fast enough. Your sense of time changes when you retire: a packed day may be the bees knees for some, but for me, if there's no time to leisurely pick up a book (for example), then I feel I've crammed in too much.


In the evening we play tennis. A good game. Relaxed. Unhurried. Why should it be otherwise...

Thursday

I watch this day fill up, starting from zero -- nothing planned, nothing expected, then slowly, as if I let the hose on and point it into a wheelbarrow and within minutes, it becomes full (I say this because in the afternoon, I actually do fill a wheelbarrow -- to water the strawberry hydrangea out front).

It begins early. At sunrise. Or just minutes before. Ed insists he's up for letting the cheepers out, but instead of rolling over and succumbing to delicious morning sleep, I think -- wouldn't it be nice to see the sun come up over the lake again? I haven't chased a sunrise in a long long time. It's a clear morning. Why not do it now?

And the minute I pull Rosie (the moped) out onto the road, I remember how stupid it is to go out like this without properly pulling on warm clothing. It's in the low fifties this morning. On a moped -- it feels really really cold.

Never mind. No time to go in for an extra jacket. It's nearly six. Sunrise happens around now and once the summer sun breaks through the horizon, its climb is brilliant and rapid. And so I continue and just as I pull up to the shore, I witness that beautiful moment, right there over Lake Waubesa when night is no longer night.






Satisfied (and cold), I leave the lake, awed by how quickly that speck of orange becomes a ball of golden fire...






...and I turn back to do my rural loop home.

Past cornfields...






...onwards, with deer crossing my path and two sandhill cranes standing, watching...






...while wispy strands of morning mist still touch the fields around us.






Oh, I'm so cold now! I pull up the farmette driveway, past the old orchard that always looks so good just after sunrise...





...and into the farmette courtyard, noting that the cheepers are out and about and Ed is in the sheep shed already, working on his latest machining project.

At the farmhouse, I bury myself deeply under the quilt --  but it's no good. Still cold. Not until much later, when I stand under a hot shower do I let the morning chill leave me and I feel like I am waking to a summer day again.

Though the "waking" part comes rather late.

And the breakfast part comes even later, since just when I'm ready to get going, Ed comes back to take a morning nap.

It is nearly 11 by the time we take our morning meal out onto the porch.






And shortly after, I am ever so happy to meet up with my Albuquerque friend -- she is in town and she has a window and that window is right now and so out comes Rosie again and off I go downtown. It's been only two months, but it always feels like life has taken so many shifts and turns since our last encounter. Time to catch up!






And then I am back at the farmette, but not for long. After rolling that water filled wheelbarrow down to my hydrangeas, I hop on behind Ed on his motorbike and we make our way to the local (evening) farmers market.  We mean to pick up only corn and to do our weekly exchange of eggs for cheese curds, but the beets look good as well and before you know it, we have a bagful of fresh produce.





Home then? No, not yet! We have our tennis rackets and so we stop in our secret forested courts and we play a dynamic if brief game of tennis.  Why brief? Because it's already late and there is supper to fix and freshly picked tomatoes to sort through (every two days Ed brings in about this many)...






So that wheelbarrow of mine surely filled quickly and I have no complaints because every hour today was (in my book) good, even if in the retelling it all seems rather straightforward. I assure you, it felt quite beautiful.

Oh, did you miss a posting of farmette flowers? Here, I haven't forgotten! At noon, in full sunlight:

eating habits

(at sunrise, out the upstairs windows)



Lunch

We bring our lunch to the porch today. Leftovers for Ed -- gnocchi from Monday's dinner. Isis sits at our feet, patient, but very much wanting a taste. And of course, Ed acquiesces. And sure enough, the cat that rejects most every cat food on the market, lovingly cradles in his mouth, then swallows appreciatively the potato dumplings, smothered in a light tomato and mushroom sauce, heavily sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan.

There isn't enough for Ed to eat after that and so he distributes the remains between the cheepers.

The farmette animals follow a strange diet.


Dinner

The evening meal on a Wednesday is a challenge. Ed often bikes on this day and doesn't get back until late. Sometimes hungry, sometimes not so much. So I make a farmette Niçoise salad. Using all farmette ingredients: tomatoes of course. Beans from our bean teepee.





Potatoes from the field out back, eggs from the cheepers. I skip the fish component. (There are no fish on the farmette.)

I settle in to watch the tail end of the PBS News Hour and eat my half of the salad.

Isis comes over.
Meow.
What, do tell me, is appetizing here for you? It's not as if there's any tuna or anchoives!





It's the potatoes. He's in that kind of a mood! I give him some, smothered in juices of the garden tomato and a dash of olive oil. His palate is definitely evolving. The cat's unstoppable!


Breakfast

You think I forgot about breakfast? Never!






And after, a walk through the garden. (It needs water again. Sigh...)










And still later -- a bike ride. Because even though I don't keep a step counter at my hip anymore, I know I'm not moving around enough by going from porch to yard to kitchen. Besides, it really is beautiful out there.



prairie, just up the road




truck farmers, working the fields to the east of the farmette




a friend along the road


There you have it: a day in three meals. And a little bit more.


One last photo, of that special slant of sunlight that tells us it's almost Autumn.

Tuesday

Sitting on the porch for breakfast, we feel the cool morning air. I have a sweater on and I know Ed's a little chilled, even though he would never say so.






What he does say is -- I'm going to miss those flowers in the winter time.

So this is it, that period in time that can't even be imagined in the cold season. Summer, a lush and plentiful summer where there was enough rain and enough sunshine to make our gardens grow.






And it seems so much part of our world now, even though in three months, it will all be gone. All of it. Pffft! Gone.






I spend the morning deadheading. Snipping off spent blooms to encourage one more run.  It's a beautiful time to work outside: the air is a cool 70 degrees, the wind refreshes and blows mosquitoes away to some distant hiding place. Can it be more perfect?






In the early afternoon, our truck framer who grows potatoes, onions and garlic in the back of the farmette, asks us to mow down her weeds for another planting run. Ed works his John Deere in exchange for a bucket of potatoes and a bagful of garlic.





And then he and I have a date! A movie and a dinner -- both frivolous and a bit of a joke, because the movie is a fun but silly little thing about restauranteurs squabbling in the south of France (a poke at the Ed who refuses to go back to my beloved Sorede exactly in that region) and the "dinner out" isn't really out at all, or at least it isn't one where we sit down across from each other at a table elsewhere; it's one where we pick up take out food at our favorite Thai place and bring it home.


Home. Where the flowers grow and the world is kind and calm and he cheepers look at me with hopeful eyes every time I pass them in the garden.

tough conversations

Morning

We all have them. A life well lived cannot exclude tough conversations. But you can do them well or you can do them poorly. Learning how to do them well is an ongoing thing. Ed and I do them significantly better than years ago. I suppose that's good.

There are a couple of ongoing conversations that really haven't an end and I suppose those are everyone's fate. You think you've found a way to accommodate both your idiosyncrasies and then you see that you haven't really and so you finesse and massage the sticking points once more. So there are those talks.






But then there are the ones that arise because a major shift has to occur. For one, for both -- either way. Change is needed. We had one back in February about travel. A conversation where convictions had been mounting but each hadn't wanted to hurt the other and so we remained silent on the topic until finally, among Greek ruins on an island mountaintop, Ed blurted an admission: he had reached his travel saturation.

In that conversation, I understood. I surely wasn't happy about it, but there was nothing to discuss. The expression of true feeling was so genuine and heartfelt that there was little more to say. Sadness to process, but few needed words.

That one's over and done with. We've moved on.





This morning though, over a wonderful breakfast, as we talk about other difficult (for me) topics, explaining things, giving perspectives -- all marking progress which is all you can hope for -- we got to one topic that really came out of the blue: the cheepers.

I blurted out that that in the scheme of things, we were better off without them.

Ed took that to mean that I would prefer for them to be gone and so he put on the table the idea of finding another home for them. And of course, it's not so easy. Both of us are tremendously attached to them. We like their personalities. (Well, I don't quite get Oreo, but I like that he likes Ed and Ed likes him.) We like that they trust us, that they find happiness in the various favorite corners of the farmette. That they depend on us and we don't let them down.

And so we begin to weigh the benefits of finding a home for them, against the modest but significant benefits of constructing a bigger enclosed space for them (so that no one *has* to let them out or lock them up every single dawn and dusk of the calendar year).

For now, we decide to leave things the way they are. The pang of imagining them gone was too strong. We're not ready for that quite yet.











And, of course, that shifts us into fields and domains that have nothing to do with chickens and that is how the morning passes because such conversations if done well, or at least fairly well, take time.






Afternoon

As promised (here on Ocean!), today I bake a peach cake. (With a modest sprinkle of pecans.)






Again I mess with ingredients, substituting yogurt for cream and again I am lucky with the final outcome.





That's not the end of it. My older girl and her husband are coming over for a postponed Sunday dinner and since she is still having a tough time with many of the dinner foods that you or I may want to put on the table on a Sunday evening and asks for pasta just one more time, I decide to at least step up from the spaghetti with home made sauce that I've been feeding them for very many weeks now.

When my girls were small, on evenings when I absolutely had no time for a multi-course dinner preparation, I would open a bag of frozen gnocchi and serve that as my go to fast-food (with tomato sauce). Gnocchi became fashionable here in the last decade or two and now there are many good recipes on how to make your own. It's a labor intensive task (boil the potatoes, make a dough out of them with flour, roll them out, cut them into morcels and then roll each one on a fork for that classic gnocchi ridge), but after a morning of conversations, I'm ready to rest my brain and work my hands.





I'll serve them with a mixed mushroom sauce and lots of cheese. Lots of cheese.


Evening

My older young couple comes over after the afternoon storms rumble through.


 


And as always, dinner on the porch is a time to listen to stories and to exhale. We do a lot of both.






And the light fades earlier and as I wash dishes afterwards, Ed sleeps on the couch and when I remind him to put away the chickens, he says (quite rightly) -- it's beginning to feel like autumn outside.

Sunday

It's almost as if I'm working again: I wake to a Sunday that marks the closure of a weekend, a wonderful week-end at that, an ending, rather than just another day resembling very much those before it and those ahead.

I'm sure my visit reshuffles the schedule of the young couple here, in the Twin Cities. Sunday brunch at 10 a.m. seems terribly early for those who treasure the rare day where no schedule is imposed by work. But they never complain, never indicate anything but delight in spending these precious few free hours together with their farmette visitor.

And so we leave their most special home, a married couple's home...






...for one last brunch together, this one at Heyday...






And of course, I take out the camera -- how can I not? Here is their patient realization that I am again aiming for a photo...






...and here's where they give me that precious pose, which is no pose at all, as they really are that happy.






Delicious foods, delicious company and then -- onwards and upwards! To the bus stop.

The bus ride home? Only 20 minutes late -- blame it on the Chicagoans clogging the highway on their end of weekend run from up north Wisconsin, back to the city.

Home now. Just two days later and still, it all looks different. Two days closer to Fall. August sets those thoughts already. Anticipating the next season.

Saturday in the Twin Cities

Early Evening

Did I wear the young ones out today? The apartment is quiet...


 


They planned a day's worth of events and foods and ramblings and now, in the early evening, they're taking a nap upstairs, as if to conserve energy for the rest of my visit! Or is it that their week is long and the play weekend is short and it has to accommodate missed sleep from previous days?


What a full and beautiful day it has been!

From a delicious brunch at the French Hen Cafe (a name with such a good intertwining of two themes that seem to be running through my life right now)...






...to a walk along the grand Mississippi River (the grandest of natural wonders, don't you think? - my girl muses) and then to the dam that creates the pounding waterfall that surely proves her point...
















And, too, we side-step to the Polish Fest, right there, by the river. (So many Poles in the Twin Cities? Who knew!)



(Polish organic farmers)


Of course, it's all about the food here...



(typical fare: potato pancakes, kielbasa, pierogi, stuffed cabbage...)





(paczki -- doughnuts, filled with rose or plum jam)



...and the polka dancing...



(older)





(younger)



...but not only. (What thoughts are meandering through this woman's head, as she sits there in her wreath of flowers and her clothes of red and white?)






We linger for a while...











...then go further into the neighborhood, where my girl and her husband show me a truly Polish bar, a place, they say, where in the evenings, there is more polka dancing and singing too.  
Polish songs? I ask.  
More like 'Moon River'... she tells me, smiling.

We sip a Polish beer...






... then walk even deeper into the neighborhood, pausing at a Polish sausage store...






...where, in fact, you can also pick up (and I do!) Polish sauerkraut and a Polish herbal tea I like (Melysa)...






And that's not the end. We visit a cafe with good, strong coffee ('the Empire') and a delicious peach cake (I'll be baking one on Monday, just you wait!), and then still more: we go to an apple cider distillery ('Sociable Cider Werks'), where you can see the vats and sample the product (so add that to my list of beverage distilleries that I have now visited)...










...and now my favorite Twin Cities couple is plum tuckered out, but me, I'm so excited about being here and seeing the city through their eyes, that I sit back and take this moment to jot down a few notes and download a few photos, because I know that if I do any of this after dinner, I will be the one dozing off and it will take me one hour to write one sentences (which is what happened last night, hence the ridiculously late posting).


After Dinner

We eat our evening meal as a foursome -- with his mom who happens to be in town right now, at the terrific 112 Eatery. Aside from birthdays and weddings more recently, I never eat out in restaurants in lively configurations these days and so it is especially delightful to indulge in all the foods and accoutrements of a grand dining experience, where it's more than just me, or just Ed and me. 






And now its nearly over -- I'll have a Sunday morning and then puff! -- out I'll go, to become once more a more distant (but always so very eager!) participant in their lives.