the unpopular vegetable

First of all, thank you to all who participated in the unofficial contest on how to remind me that there are plenty of good ways to identify plants using apps, brains and computers and/or smart phones! The mystery plant (from yesterday's post) is indeed spreading dogbane, so named possibly because it is toxic for the poor pooch who would get too close to it. It's always a surprise to me how many beautiful flowers are toxic to animals and how savvy those animals are when they encounter it.

Now about vegetables: it came as a bit of a surprise for me to find out that no one in my family likes zucchini. (I don't include myself in that since I pretty much will eat anything that's fresh and honest. You can laugh at that, but it really is true.) This distaste for what has to be the most prolific summer veggie here extends to Ed and believe me, I have tried shredding it, mixing it with other stuff, roasting it, or serving it raw. It's a no go.

This distaste for summer squash would be reason enough not to sign up for a CSA, since boxes of veggies straight from the farm always include a ton of it, from June through August. I mean, it's ratatouille season! Of course you're going to get the zucchini! But I am determined! And so when the first green squash appeared in our veggie box last week and two more followed this week, I knew I had to get creative.

Today I decided to go for chocolate zucchini bread. Maybe I can fool them all into zucchini acceptance!

The plan, by the way, is to spend lots of time in the kitchen today. I have the young family coming to dinner and in addition, my daughter's friend is visiting from California. Reason enough to take extra care with the meal. First though there is the garden stuff to attend to. 

(Dance follows me on my weeding expedition...)

 

Here's what's blooming!

(Clematis Heather Herschell)

(daylily loveliness)

(ah... The Meadow!)

(Here's Bed No. 2: it's the one that runs along the driveway. Rarely photographed because it's long and narrow and a tiny bid odd in the plant selection. Still, I've made a small effort to improve it over the past two years, so I'm bringing around my camera here again!)

There's weeding to be done and I do it before breakfast. 

(morning meal that now typically gets pushed closer to noon on Sundays)

And then I get to it: chocolate zucchini bread from the Love and Lemons website. It's a great recipe because it uses no sugar (just maple syrup) and just a tiny bit of coconut oil. Otherwise it's all about eggs and flours and spices and cocoa and chocolate chips. Two loaves! They better be good!

The gang arrives!

Hey, is that a first smile that I see on Sandpiper?

Maybe, maybe not. Hard to tell!

("hey, what do you want from me? I'm only a month old!")

(held by the newly arrived guest...)

Dinner is a shrimp, squid and scallop pasta.

 

We eat.

And for all the weather fluctuations -- the hot, the dry, the wet, the steamy -- tonight was one perfect evening. Kid bedtimes always end an evening for us. Were it not for that, I'd be out there still, watching the night set in, slowly, gently, with just a touch of a summer breeze. Like a song. Like a beautiful summer song.

fixes

From 4 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, Ed worked to restore his computer (which had shown him the blue screen of death late last night) to working order. There were sighs, groans and grunts as he searched for ways to bring back files he believed he had stored somewhere in the cloud. Occasionally he would come up for air -- for example at breakfast time...

But mostly his attention was elsewhere. With his usual patience and calm, he persevered and eventually a tiny fraction of what was lost came back to life again. The rest? Kiss it good bye.

Since he was focused on his laptop (using my computer to google solutions), I directed my attention elsewhere. To the garden, of course. But it was drizzling all morning long, so that it was a wet if not wasted effort. I had just read a newspaper article where a gardener admonished the reluctant end-of-June gardener for slowing down now, since there are important tasks you need to keep doing to keep that perennial bed looking good. I had to smile. What gardener gives up on the whole season this early! I mean, when we have buggy summers, I'm ready to give it a break in mid August. But now? We have such a beautiful month for flowers coming to us! Sure, things never quite grow according to your winter plans and visions, but they do grow, and there is always magnificence out there in this first month of true summer.

The author of the piece really emphasized the importance of deadheading and of weeding. At first I felt smug: I deadhead like a woman possessed, and I have been weeding the main beds very diligently and very consistently this spring. But note my qualifying word here: "main" beds. I admit it: I've neglected the far corners of the more out-of-sight beds. I got to them this morning, drizzle or no drizzle. 

I noticed that the wild blackberries that grow along the driveway are ripening right about now.

I think blackberries have a rather bland taste, but these juicy babies do have a sweet punch to them. The cheepers love them!

Speaking of the cheepers, here's young Cherry on the approach to one of our ferals. Who is going to scare who in the end?

You guessed it: the cat went flying as she got too near for his comfort.

All the kids and their mom came to the farmette for a visit and lunch and I immediately directed them to the blackberries...

... and they had my same lukewarm reaction. I do think that blackberries pair well with, say, peaches in a cobbler. But for snacking, we'll pick our local berries and cherries and peaches anytime.

The kids -- all three of them! -- were adamant that this should be an indoor day. Can't blame them. Rain is rain.

(sleepy?)

(nope)

(how many can sit on a loveseat?)

(pretend play: I am a mermaid and he is the captain!)

One quick whiff of an emerging daisy...

... and they're off. And I do some spot cleaning and then Ed comes out of his bubble and proclaims that only a tiny fraction of files are coming back and we should go for a walk.

And so we go. To our county park.  

(on the way: like a Seurat painting!)

There is a drizzle on and off, but not enough to steer us away. 

 (three turtles and a bird...)

 (What, you cant see the bird? Okay, I'll move in a little. It's probably a blue heron.)

 It's a walk worth taking: we cut across two beautiful prairies. Stunning, really. 

(can anyone tell me what this is? I cannot identify it!)

Maybe this is as close as we'll get to a large field of flowers...

 

 

 

Maybe our half measures at the farmette will never amount to much: we'll keep chopping down thistle and it will keep coming back. Interspersed with wild parsnip and excessive dogwood and goldenrod.

That would be just fine. We're lucky to live so close to so many beautiful landscapes. Our new forest will always be an experiment. A work in progress. To adjust and improve again and again.

chasing the taco

How far would you go to please your beloved partner, where what they want conflicts with what you yourself would feel good about?

Because no answer to that is a good answer (going too far is not good, but not far enough is even worse), Ed and I typically sidestep the problem by not asking the other to do something they would rather not do. Still, I have heard repeatedly this spring that the whole new forest project was triggered by my prompt to finally plant some trees in the distant reaches of the farmette lands. Not quite "it's your fault that I have to do all this work," but close. I guess I didn't realize I was pushing the project.

Too, I heard repeated comments about tonight being taco night. They were said in that tone that implies that we would have had a nice leisurely evening at home, but no, I wanted to go for fish tacos at the Cider Farm (they were introducing a new rose cider and serving fish tacos outside and I thought that sounded so fun!). I did say -- we don't have to go! He responded -- no no, we'll go. Meaning it will only be a minor bother.

It's a rainy day and indeed, it may well be a rainy week, which I know you think is great because rain tends to cancel out a drought, but the fact is -- too much rain is worse than too little, from the planter's perspective. And excessive rain inevitably will bring out the mosquitoes. Too, it's not fun working outside when it is so wet.

It's not even fun feeding the animals in the morning, though one does get the views of a wet garden and those are, in fact, lovely.

(wet lilies)

(...and peas)

Breakfast is on the porch. No rain there!

And afterwards, well, I know what I have to do: I have to wage war with the weeds. I know the deck is stacked against me, but I fight as if it were a matter of pride and honor rather than because I expect a clean flower bed at the end of the day. Out I go, until I'm wet from pushing around rain drenched plants and my shoes slosh and my dress, put on for the expected evening out on the Cider Farm patio, is clinging to my legs and dripping with its own rain drops. Or maybe it's sweat? We are having a mini heat bath out there right now.

Inside again I glance at my emails: one of the Cider Farm owners writes to tell me that they decided against fish tacos tonight. They're going with a fish fry. And that just tips the cart for Ed. A good fish fry with lots of sides may have still held his interest, but this would be a longish drive for unknown edibles. I know better than to push it. No fish tacos for us tonight.

Unless...

There is  a good taqueria near us that does, in fact, make quite good fish tacos. And there is this picnic table out in the open fields of the Badfish Creek Wildlife Area that Ed passes weekly on his evening bike ride. And he has this idea... 

And so we pack a picnic bag: tacos from Tapatios included, a margarita thrown in for good measure, cider included, farmette cherries included, two chocolates from the Madison Chocolate shop...

... and we have a taco dinner outside after all. 

And it is stunningly beautiful. And quiet. Just the sound of birds. And the flash of the occasional firefly. Nothing more.

narrative

Not to get too wordy here about interpretations of words (ha!), but I did want to add my two cents on the topic (addressed by an opinion writer in the paper today) of whether writing your pandemic story or your day's story or even your life story allows you to move from being locked with your own feelings of despair to creating something good of all that has happened. The theory is that writing will help you confront and presumably disperse all your worst anxieties. After you've done that, you will grow.

Maybe. But it seems to me that you need more than just a reflective hour at the keyboard to pull yourself up and to move beyond whatever has been holding you down, big or small. You need to first convince yourself that you are in fact in control of your narrative. Moreover, the spin you put on your tale will likely determine how together you are at the end of it.

And how do you describe your life? What's your narrative like?

We weren't all happy, carefree, strong and hopeful before the pandemic and so returning to prepandemic levels of sanity, even if it were easy, isn't necessarily going to put us in a good place. Nor is the pandemic likely to have pushed you into a better place. If you weren't oozing contentment before, you're not easily going to pick up those thought processes now.

But here's the thing: you really are in charge of your pen. It will do what you want it to do. From the tone you take, the words you choose, to the events that you describe -- it's all yours, you control it. And that's so powerful, I think! 

So maybe creating the arc of a good life is helped (tremendously!) by creating a good narrative of your life. Still, is that honest? I mean, isn't it cheating to leave out the awful, or to describe it as something other than awful? Hell no! If you can spin a good yarn out of a miserable bag of shabby wool, well then you are good! Be proud!

I've always seen this powerful side of writing in the story telling that I do here, but today's article in the paper made me confront it head on, as part of the Ocean text.

Otherwise, the day was, well, summer-like. It reminded me of those days when you were a kid at summer camp and there were rain clouds and you wondered if all your activities would be messed with because of the weather. (Which in turn reminded me of today's music notes on the radio, where I learned that the musician Percy Grainger spent seven years teaching at Interlochen Music Camp until he could stand it no more. He and his wife eventually left at which point she commented -- this would be such a wonderful place if only there weren't the all these horrid children here!)

(Morning walk: cloudy and sort of cool)

(lots of dainty achillea starting to bloom...)

(a self sown pea is proving to be delicately stunning!)

(and the meadow... oh, the meadow...)

We had breakfast with friends who stopped by to retrieve the motorbike Ed had fixed, but also, I think, to walk through the garden with me. (This is the person who has volunteered for years at Olbrich Botannical Gardens, so she knows a thing or two about perennials.)

And then the two older kids came to the farmette. I had to coax them a little to come to the meadow. It's not too hard: just tell them they can pick some flowers. Any flowers. I would not give myself that privilege, but for them, I will give the world.

 

I've said this before: kids and meadows belong together.

After, Snowdrop made cherry earrings out of the cherries I picked and Sparrow build castles out of magna tiles. Somewhere in the background, I read them a book.

Back at their home, I chat up a sleeping Sandpiper.

 

 

Toward evening Ed and I pick up our CSA box of veggies (so many peas!) and then head to our local farmers market where we pause to talk to one of our favorite farmers there. Ed has questions about weed suppression (the answers were disheartening: you want to get rid of Canadian thistle? Get out that shovel and start digging!), but eventually we get to more personal topics as she tells us about a drama that's unfolding in her life. I mean, it's sadder than sad and infuriating too. Makes you want to scream "life is so unfair!"But the way she tells it -- well, it's beautiful, really. The love is so obvious. Her sense of humor, her "I'm going to take charge of this" -- they're powerful. We walk away a little stunned, a lot in awe.

The amazing power of a beautiful narrative... Really, we should all aspire to it.

all is calm

I had a zoom call with my Polish friends today and out of the many, many topics that we covered (how to break bones without really trying, why Sweden raided Poland in the 17th century, is tradition anti progressive), one stuck in my mind: how to be the person of calm in the family as you grow older. It came up from one set of grandparents who were getting ready to visit and help their daughter manage a newborn -- a third child in that household. The grandmother (even more than the grandpa, by his own admission) packed and brought with her an aura of calm to the home of each family where a child was added (and given that they're about to be grandparents to the thirteenth grandchild, that was a heck of a lot of calm to work on). And I thought that joy is born of calm and if you can be the agent of peace and tranquility, well, you've given more than a young family could ever hope for. The goal isn't to succeed in anything. The goal is merely to consistently try.

I've not seen all of my friends do their grandparent thing, but I have seen some and they have been magnificent at it! It made me wonder if there is a special place in heaven for the Polish grandma. Whatever angst broils within her, she's not likely to unload it. Instead, she is there for you til her last breath. You can see her in Polish parks holding the hand of a young child, or at a Polish dinner table ladling out chicken soup. I'm feeding stereotypes here and I know there are the outliers or exceptions, but as I talk to my friends in Warsaw, I keep hearing in their stories this same theme, this great desire to provide balance to the tumult in a young family's life, to ease the disquiet, to offer that setting where happiness resides. (And I must say, grandchildren are not a necessary component here: you can be the perfect grandma to your children too! Same set of skills: ease the disquiet, offer a gentle calm in its stead.)

 

Let me go back to the morning though. I see that the lilies are beginning to pop open! (The early yellow ones of course bloomed for weeks now, but to appreciate the full day lily experience, you have to wait for the other colors to emerge.)

More summer bloomers: hollyhock and lavender, the latter with an appreciative bee.

Breakfast, but without Ed. He got busy cleaning up the remains of a squirrel (don't ask) and by the time he was done with that horrible project, the breakfast hour was long gone.

In the late afternoon, I do what I have not done for a long long time: I meet up with a special friend at a local coffee shop.

And it is sublime. Having just passed through a period of isolation makes one deeply appreciative of the gifts a coffee date can bring to your day. Talk about calm! A friend can play that role well too!

Evening. Ed is out biking and I am making up for a day of inactivity. I  climb the ladder, trying hard to balance without swaying and pick the last of the cherries that have been so abundant for us this year. Lovely stuff. 

 

 

 

And I come in just in time to pick up a FaceTime from this little one:

 

 

 

No storms for me today, inside or out. Just a lovely summer day!