Tuesday

A beautiful day. A busy day. A short post day.

A day where I think a lot about travel. The importance of it. The difficulty of leaving. The excitement of planning. All of it.

I stare hard at my flowers and warn them that if they pop more than one bud open in the ten days I am away I'll be terribly upset. Being dramatic with one's garden isn't necessarily helpful but it makes you feel good.

Breakfast. Lovely as always. No matter how great the croissant over there, this porch breakfast will always be at the top of my heap.






A look out at the big flower field.






A look west toward the echinacea plant. Moved here just last year.






And then I hurry over to Snowdrop's home. It's a cooler day today and she's dressed appropriately for it. And she is raring to go.






So we go for a walk. A lovely walk -- mommy, Snowdrop and gaga.






Quiet time afterwards. With a book...






In my lap, tapping the rhythm of a song on the tiny player keyboard.






And then finally I head home. Oh, I should spend the rest of the day readying the garden for my absence, but one glance tells me that it's faring well. I'll do touch ups early tomorrow morning, but it looks steady on its feet (only please let it rain at least once while I'm away!).

I attend, instead, to more pressing matters, like, for example, dragging Ed out to the nearest store so that he can pick up a pair of shorts. He has only two pairs and one has more tears than even the hippest torn up pair you'll see on a young kid. Lucky break: the shorts are only $13.92 each and so he agrees to putting two into our cart.

A quiet supper, a wistful stroll to the coop in the evening. Yeah, it's hard to leave it all and (especially) the people on this side of the ocean. But I know this about life: you can't run from new experiences just because the old ones are so comfortable and fine.

Still, it is a beautiful evening here in the Midwest, at the farmette, at home.

Monday

It's yet another unusual week. June is full of them this year! Oh, it conforms to a pattern today: it's Monday and Snowdrop spends the day at the farmhouse, which surely must feel like an extension of her home right now -- you know, the playroom in a very large mansion. But that's today. On Wednesday, I'm taking off and so I must at least half focus my attentions on that part of the week. Even though truthfully, were I to be planning my travels right now, I would not have picked late June of this year for going away. (When I made my plans, I thought my Warsaw apartment would be fully renovated by now. But, things got delayed when the current residents couldn't quite move out in March. And so yes, I'll be going to Poland, but only because I have a ticket that puts me there. The rest of the trip has been hastily adjusted to put me somewhere else.)

Alright, but today is Monday and after breakfast (such a beautiful day today!)...


 


... and a quick look and a fix up of my garden...  -- in which the daylilies are adding color...






... though perhaps overshadowed right now by the pink hydrangeas...






... in great competition with the little guys (geranium, evening primrose, daisy, dianthus)...






... to say nothing of the ever sleek and sophisticated japanese iris...






... I have this wonderful and easy day with Snowdrop. I say easy because honestly, I have had such a hand on her pulse recently that it takes no talent to fill her hours here. (You'll recognize the activities -- you've seen them in the last week.)


She hunts down ripe raspberries.






The cheepers follow.






She sweeps the chips in front of the house.






I suggest the pool -- she's all for it! The pool came with a shade umbrella -- a silly thing for us because there is so much shade at the farmette. But I put it up, for the hell of it. Useless, but cute.






Four pool play photos for you. She is entirely happy making up stories as she splashes about. She can occupy herself in this way for a long, long time.





















I tell her we should go inside now. She runs away.






Are you chasing me, grandma?






Lunchtime on the porch. Oh, she loves that! Dessert:






And a view toward the great outdoors.






A few minutes of play indoors -- she is no longer content just to sit quietly at her table.






Snowdrop, watch what you're doing!
Grandma, I have it under control.






She naps, I have a quiet moment on the porch. With coffee and a special cookie.






I take her home. We go for a walk with her mommy, we pause at the coffee shop. Snowdrop has said "mommy" more times today than in the entire last week. She acknowledges the pleasure of having those you love around you.







Evening at the farmhouse. Just Ed and I. And our flowers (and cheepers and tomatoes and trees and odds and ends...). This year, I favored putting in the so called spider day lilies. This newly blooming one surely demonstrates the appropriateness of the name.






One last look at the garden. At the bed I planted from scratch last year. Doing well! And we are too! How good is that...

the end of a farmette vacation

We were surprised this morning by an unusually strong thunderstorm. Pounding rain, flashing lights -- you'd think Snowdrop would wake up, but no. Not a peep from the room next door. I wasn't in a hurry to step out in all that racket and so Ed volunteered to open up the coop.

I thought I'd catch many more hours of sleep. Snowdrop went to bed so much later last night! Surely she'd sleep in past her usual farmhouse 8, but no. She wakes up, plays in bed for a while then demands to join the rest of the world.

She eats breakfast part A (her usual mushy stuff) and then I bathe her and make breakfast part B: farmhouse pancakes.






It's getting hot even in this still rather early hour, but we have a fan on the porch and Snowdrop never fails to appreciatively point to it when I tell her that we need some cool air.

But taking a walk around the farmette (with her entourage) is another matter.






Oh, she's happy to be outside, but very quickly she suggests a wagon might be the way to go. I tell her that pulling her around in a wagon in this hot weather is about as attractive to me as building pyramids in the blazing dessert. I pause to take a look at the rain soaked lovely lilies (the day ones and the true ones)...











(And I have not a small amount of satisfaction from seeing how much I managed to cut back the ditch lilies from the front of the farmhouse: I agreed to leave a thin row for this year, just because Ed thinks they're a good reminder of the house's humble past and, too, he swears they attract a certain breed of frog.)






And then I suggest an outing to Wingra Park, where this weekend they are holding the Midwest log rolling competition. The championship events are scheduled for the afternoon, but there are some local challenges going on all day and I thought this may be a grand excuse to hang out by the lake and watch people fall into the water.

I do not regret the outing, but the little girl is caught in a bind: to sit in a stroller on a hot day -- that's just not her. To run around in boggy (from the rain) grasses under the glaring sun -- not that either. Slowly we make our way toward the water as she pauses to mull over the possibilities, not exactly loving any of her options.






Once we reach the water's edge, I encourage her to watch the boom running event. There are hardly any onlookers and I think she should add her support to these earnest log loving athletes. She is, however, indifferent to their talents in running down the wobbly logs.






In the end, I get her to concentrate for a few minutes...






... and I think perhaps some onlookers may have appreciated her very emphatic reaction to one runner's loss of balance and big splash into the water. Oh-oh! -- the little girl said loudly. (It is her favorite word for when things fall down which, for a toddler, is a fairly frequent occurrence.)

On the way back, she figures out how to push this rather hard to control farmhouse stroller...






... and this makes her happy enough for me to continue on with our adventure. We cover the small Monroe Street farmers market, picking up a baguette for lunch and then we stop at Barrique's -- one of our favorite  coffee shops, where bits of oatmeal raisin cookie (and a long gaze at the comings and goings of others) make Snowdrop very happy indeed.


 



At home, I give over some of the baguette, along with her usual lunch foods and she is kind enough not to say the obvious -- not anywhere near the good ones she had across the ocean.






And in the afternoon, we do not dally. We prepare! Snowdrop's mommy and daddy are scheduled to fly in this evening from across the ocean and I want to have dinner ready for them. And there are raspberries to pick for dessert!






In all honesty,  I had very modest goals for this week: getting Snowdrop to feel happy at the spray of a garden hose.






Allowing her to pick berries,  which she has devoured and loved since starting in on real foods. And then adding that treat -- the whipped cream. And showing her how to lick the beaters after the final whip.






Too, I wanted to give her moments of great joy, even though I'm sure she missed her mommy and daddy. (Each time the phone rang, she was sure it was mommy, just because she chatted with mommy on the phone before her mommy flew off and away.)






And so I have no last minute imperatives. Snowdrop has been a bundle of cooperation all week long.

I prepare predinner snacks. I always set aside a plateful for Ed. This time, Snowdrop shares in his bounty.






It's as if this were any other Sunday. Early evening comes and I see their car in our driveway. I tell Snowdrop her mommy and daddy are here.






If she needed a period of readjustment, none of us saw it tonight. It is a beautiful evening out on the farmette porch!






It seems that the whipped cream on the berries never tasted so good.






How to end this post... Here's something that sticks in my head -- the fireflies from our late night out. Ed said I should have tried to take a picture of the evening, but this is a tad absurd: the only way I know how to photograph a firefly is to shoot randomly and hope something comes of it.

In reviewing my photos, I see that something came of one such shot. I'll end with that.

We'll watch the fireflies sparkin', do some sparkin' too...