Wednesday

Without question, today will be noted in the books as the nicest of all 2022 March days here in south central Wisconsin. A high of 64F (or nearly 18C!). The pressure is on to do something!

But first, a visit with the animals, who are frisky and a little nuts from the sudden rush of warm air on this beautiful spring day.

And breakfast, with daffodils, hyacinths, and cake.

After hearing from our AirBnB hosts in the Ukraine (remember, our travels there start... right now!), we decided to extend our "vacation" in their beautiful country for a few more days. I recommend it for all of you! There are still a great number of available apartments and houses and the rates are unbeatable. Too, AirBnB has waved all fees associated with the bookings. Come on, take a trip!

 

In the alternative (or better yet -- in addition!), take a hike with the two of us, over in the Brooklyn Wildlife Area. Put on your Wellies, it's muddy out there!

 

 

Nothing is budding yet. We are too early to spot green tips, either in the ground or on trees. But the air is magnificent and the smell of spring is strong!

Of course, Ed dresses for the season. Shorts and t-shirt. And I shed my glasses to test out a new way of moving around.

We always feel better, sprightlier, and altogether happier after a hike! 

It's another four days until spring, but in our hearts, we're rushing the season. Refresh, renew, leap forward, recognize hope. Yeah, even though it's only March 16th!

With love...

Tuesday

Time to bake again. Apple cake, which is a rerun. (Snowdrop told me she loves everything about it but the apples. Well now, what is left, I ask you...)

The house smells of cinnamon and nutmeg. The sun is out. The path to the barn is even more squishy-muddy and the chickens are exercising their territorial rights by seeking out the farthest corners of farmette lands. We are, at heart, explorers all.

Ed and I are happy to take a walk, happy to feel the warmth of the day (50F or 10C, so not bad, don't you think?), happy to be on the hunt for any color changes in the landscape. 

(right now: a golden prairie against a corn blue sky)

It will be another month before we lose the browns out there, but it's always fun to see the first rebels -- the crocus stalks, the green tips of future daffodils.

In the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop.

(conversation with the youngest chickens)

We're pausing with the longer books for a while so that I can push before her suggestive books about far away places. It's good to learn about cities you've never been to, don't you think?

At home, the brothers:

Back at the farmhouse, supper is simple. Cheeper eggs, cauliflower. We have work to do: we plan a vacation, starting tomorrow, in the Ukraine. A week in Kharkiv, a week in Mykolaiv, finished off with time in Kyiv. Airbnb homes, beautifully presented, not too long ago waiting for guests. Booked now by us, with the hope that our "travels" there will help.

With love and hope...

Monday

How can I have a snowball effect on what appears to be one of the prettiest March days yet?  There's no snow out there (thank goodness)! And still, the analogy holds.

The morning was as normal as apple pi (haha!). The chickens were all over the place, happy to be on dirt rather than on snow or ice. 

All good. But at breakfast, the phone calls begin. Not for me, for Ed. 

Long conversations, attempting to resolve a company problem in logistics, leading to an endless stream of phone calls. We'd made plans to go on a longer hike, but he was so wrapped up in his series of calls that I could barely convey to him that I had to dash out for one appointment or another, and could he please attend to the ice cream sandwiches coming with the groceries, because they were about to be delivered and I had to run. Yeah, yeah, bla bla bla.

One of my appointments was with an eye doc. The eye problem that emerged while I was away grew over the weeks and though I suspected I could deal with it on my own, I thought a little medicine boost might hurry the recovery along, so I went. And yes, I got some ointment or other and yes it will probably resolve matters rapidly, but in the meantime, the doc said I really should have eye cataract surgery already.

Hey! (this from me) Just last year, the doc at this very clinic said I had ways to go!

I'm telling you (this from the doc today) that you dont have ways to go and if I were you, I'd do it sooner rather than later.

So I thought about this and about the possibility of me being without glasses in about six months. I looked at my face in the car mirror, glasses tossed momentarily to the side. Horrible! The frames are everything! I had asked the eye doc why it always seems that old people had smaller eyes. Do eyes actually shrink with age?  And he assured me they did not, it's just that the face sort of closes in on them. 

Oh yes. I can see it. Too, my permanent frown above my nose is nicely hidden by glass frames. Shed the glasses and it's front and center. No! That cannot be the new me!

(Ed's response? Gorgeous, you can wear your frames without any glass in them.)

In thinking about this very inconsequential matter, I managed to distract myself from the world's problems for a good hour. But, between my appointments and Ed's phone calls, we had taken a big bite out of our afternoon and there was no time left for a long hike, despite Daylight Savings Time. Added to the list of the most trivial problems you could possibly imagine, was the fact that Ed had put away the groceries and so now I don't know where anything is. 

Sometimes you need snowballs to get your mind off of the news of the world. And though you should never stop feeling compassion for all who are in such deep trouble right now (and that pool is large, extending way beyond the Ukraine), nonetheless, you have to also acknowledge your good fortunes, including those that lead you to have a stream of lucky days, full of trivial and inconsequential issues that have no impact on the well being of you or those you love. This is, after all, what we all wish was ours: a day without calamity. A day where hope is budding within plain sight.

Here's my tiny bud of hope, right in my own back yard:

And toward evening, at a time when I should start in on dinner, Ed, who has been hanging on the phone for hours, listening to horrible music, waiting for the IRS to pick up (they never did), turns to me and asks -- can't we go for a walk? A short one? I think we need it. 

We walk just to the turtle pond and it feels grand. There is the sound and movement of birds all around us.

 

The pond is still partly iced over, but the path is squishy and muddy and wonderful. 

 

 

 

The snowballs recede, the golden tones of a beautiful evening take hold.

Yes, the moon is there, over all of us. 

With love...

 

Sunday

House cleaning is one of those jobs that no one likes. Either you have a day set for it, or you do it randomly, as the mood strikes, but I bet anything you're not keen on it. (Or you pay someone to do it. Lucky you. I have always thought that money saved from not paying for cleaning could then be used for travel. You make your choices.) 

Ed and I do not have the same attitude toward house neatness and most of the time -- like for all the huge differences that make Ed Ed and Nina Nina -- we find a way to wiggle to the end of the day without any trouble. In fact, we both tend to be amused at how different we are in our approach to our surroundings.

Sometimes, however, either he or I toss out a caustic comment about a cluttered space (never our own cluttered space of course) and then the race is on to see who can throw out more snide remarks in the space of an hour about the other one's personal habits.

This morning was like that. I can't even remember who started it. Was it me, about his pile of junk next to the couch, or him, pointing a nasty finger at my pile of papers on the counter of the kitchen. Before long, we had escalated to me saying things like "if only you had finished the writers shed, I would have had a place to put those papers," and him waving his accusing finger beyond the papers, like to the spices accumulating next to the stove, and the stack of kid books next to the orange couch. Luckily, he did not go so far as to point a finger to the sun room where I let the kids leave their toy "arrangements" way past a time that other people would regard as reasonable. It may have degenerated into me going after the sheep shed, where feathers still remain from a bird unfortunately brought in by one of the cats some time ago.

We are breakfast together, but it was a quiet meal, each of us probably harboring some thoughts about how unreasonable the other person at the table was being.

By mid morning, he vacuumed and I scrubbed and the sun came in, first from the east windows, then from the south and we put away our cleaning utensils, and the house looked great, and we hugged in our happiness at getting the house cleaning behind us. 

 

And now came the time to trim the young orchard.

Talk about a complicated job! We only sort of know what we are doing. Take out most anything that grows toward the inside. Okay, I get that. But most our fruit trees grew in weird and unconventional ways and working around branches that are oddly shaped and definitely not something you'd find in a magazine presentation of a great orchard is a challenge.

Nonetheless, the weather is brilliant. It's as if that Spring Forward really did push us into the spring season. It feels like we made it! Like winter is history!

I do some modest yard clean up too. I attend to the pruning of lavender bushes and I rake a little here, a little there. And as I begin the task of creating this year's "splendid garden," I wonder to myself -- will I work as hard at it now, when I am both older and the pandemic isn't keeping us locked into our personal spaces so much? Ed and I have one large gardening project set for this year and two moderate ones to supplement what we started last summer. After that, will I slow down? And read a book on the porch with a glass of lemonade more often than I did last summer?

I didn't say I came to any conclusions about any of it. I just thought about it.

And in the evening, the young family is here for dinner. It's light when they come, it's even still light when they leave. I put away my winter placemats and brought out my flowery-berry ones and oh, did that feel good! Before you know it, we'll be eating on the porch.

Well, maybe not that soon, but we are on our way!

(We're also toasting my daughter's recent job promotion...)

 

 

(No picture of Sparrow! Snowdrop and I were charged with giving him a haircut and he was feeling not in the best spirits during and after! Here's Snowdrop, waiting with her ribbon rewards for good haircut behavior. None were awarded.)

All this and spring days before us. We are lucky and grateful.

With love...

Saturday

It's a day of recovery for me: I do get tired after vaccinations and having had a vaccination yesterday -- boing!!! I'm tired. Ed did the morning walk to feed the animals and I slept in until 10, and after that, I napped! 

Talk about mimicking the habits of an old person! And, too, how quickly your ambitions can change in the space of a week: just seven days ago, my Fitbit was bouncing with congratulatory messages as I zipped past 20 000 steps each day. Today, I didn't even hit a 1000. (This has been my lowest step count since I purchased the darn guilt machine.)

So what thoughts run through your head on days when you are recovering? Of course, these days, Ed and I spend a lot of time talking about the crisis in the Ukraine. We tend not to read the same literature on the subject and at breakfast me share nuggets of information and of course, we speculate about what comes next. That's a given. I'm sure you do the same (or at least give this more than a passing thought). One has to. It's like the pandemic: you can't hide from certain realities. At the same time, you have to return to your own future and think in more mundane terms about what groceries to buy and what to do on your spring break vacation. I have mine all planned out (both groceries and spring vacation)! But I attended to tweaks this afternoon, after I poured a gallon of coffee into me so that I would stay awake until it was time to really go to sleep!

You could point fingers at me and call my day one of great laziness. Don't you think that "recovery" sounds better? Outside, we are having one of the final days of really cold weather. Inside -- I'm on the couch and proud of it! (Here's a fact: I think this is my first day since moving here that I did not leave the farmhouse at all. At all!)

But tomorrow, I will regroup and move forward. See you then!

(Lovely evening light, as only early spring can deliver...)

Friday

Sometimes you just have to reset and restart, or even do an about face. You plan on X and Y happens. That's surely what my older daughter had to do last Friday when the school called her and told her Snowdrop was sick and needed to come home. (Not Covid. She'd already had that.) And that's again what she had to do today, as another school called and told her Sparrow was sick and needed to go home. (Not Covid. He'd already had that.) A trickle of adjustments follow. Snowdrop was supposed to visit with her other grandparents this afternoon (as were her brothers). That's not going to happen. I was supposed to take care of details that will set the rest of the month for me. That's not going to happen either. Reset, about face.

But all this is not unusual. Covid has made us tense about being sick, even as young kids inevitably parade through bugs and viruses all year long and especially in the colder months.

Today, by the way, is a colder day of a colder month. I did not need a thermometer to tell me that. Happy, the rooster, always trembles in the cold. This morning he was trembling.

That's one reason to bake. Warm smells, warm kitchen, and a snacking cake to get me through the last of the winter weather. Plus I need to use up a tub of ricotta cheese and a basket full of soft blueberries. Let's make this totally woodsy and atmospheric. I light a sapin (fir tree) candle and put out a sapin honey for the fruits...

Ed invites Friendly to the table. I put up with Friendly because he and Ed really like each other. Personally, I think that cat's too needy. Sort of the opposite of Ed. Perhaps therein lies the match.

Eventually the skies clear and I pick up a happy Snowdrop at school. (She is a child who is quick to pop a smile and tell a happy story from her day. It's always about friends.)

 

 

 

We have a longer play time at the farmhouse... 

 

 

 

 

 

... and it is nearly dinner by the time I drop her off at home. (Remember: one brother's down, but the other? Not at all. At nine and a half months, Sandpiper never sits still. Ever.)

 

And then, just as the first star lights up a darkening sky, I drive home.  

Oh, but it surely is grand to be moving toward these longer days, to be made magically even longer this weekend (Daylight Savings). Now, I'm not making any plans for tomorrow. If nothing is set, there will be no reset, right? I'm just going to wait and see what the day brings. Watch it bring a boat load! Shush! 

Happily counting the days (9!)  until spring!

Thursday

So it's a little cold, so what. Alright, not a little cold. Very cold. The tail end of winter always returns for an encore performance, both in terms of cold weather and snow. We forgive it in the same way we forgive summer heat waves in September. I turn the kettle on and brew a berry blast tea and luxuriate in the warmth of the farmhouse. Because really, given what's going on in other cold corners of the planet, it's noting short of luxury to sit in a warm room and sip berry blast tea.

(But it was a cold walk to the barn.)

Dance, our once feral cat, insisted on joining us for breakfast. She has come to really love sitting at the table (well, on the table) for the morning meal, and on the couch, right between us, for dinner. (Yes, Ed and I eat dinner on the couch. Don't tell anyone.)

So here we are, immersed in out various projects, with a cat at the side, making sure we don't stray or misbehave.

The afternoons are a little crazy this week (and next week), because I need to fit stuff in. For example, the little girl needs a hair trim, so after school, I take her to a place she hasn't seen since before the pandemic. I've been trimming her hair at home and it's been looking a little jagged.

And yes, we have some solid play/book time at the farmhouse, but I have to hustle toward evening, because we are charged with picking her brother up at school. Right here, where Snowdrop pickups once took place (before she switched to the public school in her neighborhood). Hi Sparrow!

We drive home.

I try not to linger at my daughter's home -- farmhouse dinners have been running very late in recent times -- but, with three kids, one daughter and one son-in-law to catch up with, it's hard to leave.

Looking back now, it doesn't seem like such a crazy busy day, does it? But as usual, I'm wondering why evening came so fast. One minute I'm feeding the animals in the barn, the next I'm eating popcorn on the couch with Ed. Is it just me, or has our perception of time changed now that we are not so immersed in the details of the pandemic? Time moved slowly two years ago. Not any more. With more to do, the days are starting to feel loaded. Like a packed snowball speeding down an incline. The fatter it gets, the faster it goes.

Still, we're heading into the spring season. I suppose getting there quickly can't be all bad!

March, marching forward

Anyone remember how I gave March a bad rap, oh, back in the Fall? I threw out insults as "the worst month ever" with "too much of winter" and "too little of spring?" Well, I'm changing my mind. It takes a pandemic for you to really dig into the beauty of change. During lockdowns, and endless waits for a vaccine, any vaccine, 50% effective-would-be-so-great vaccine, during family separations and birthday parties with no "party" in it, Zoom Thanksgivings and curbside pickups, and no school, no friends, no idea as to when things would change for the better, the grind seemed without end. And now along comes March and it is so clear that no matter what the weather today, we are inching toward spring. Can you imagine? We are inching toward spring!! (And by the way, winter wasn't so awful for us here, in south central Wisconsin either!) 

The day starts early. Ed has a work call, I have a meet up with a friend. I hurry with the chores. Feed the cats: we are all a bouncy, sprightly lot!

And the cheepers. Hi, girls! How's life for you these days? I know, right? Spring is in the air!

Before I take off, Ed and I munch on some fruits and discuss sexism and whether it exists in innocuous comments that unintentionally disparage the successes of girls. Yeah, I often bring up hefty topics before I even have my cup of coffee!

And now comes my reentry into a social event -- one of my most important ones! Coffee with a good friend. In a coffee shop. Inside. She'd asked if I was okay with that and I said yes, so long as there's some social distancing between tables. We go to one place and I said no, not good enough. Too tight. (Besides, it smelled of burnt bacon.) So we go to another and it's perfect! (Except that the table was positioned right below of Russia and N.Korea. We switched tables! Well, because of the squinty overload of sunshine rather than map details!)

It was heavenly to be drinking a cappuccino indoors again.

And in the afternoon, Ed and I go for a walk because the sun is so promising and even the nip in the air does not distract from the slow evolution of seasonal activity. Snow's melting and guess what? The first cranes have appeared. I hear their warble and sure enough: you can see them blending into the wetlands.

Do you think they regret coming when it's still so cold? (It really is still very nippy.)

They're well protected.

How do you know? They head south to avoid the cold!

They head to Florida because they like Florida. They come back because they're fine with the cold.

I don't know about cranes, but I for one love to enter a warm house after a walk in the brisk air! Still, how can you not love a month that promises us the beginning of something so wonderful as spring!

Happy March indeed!

Alpine meadows at home

It is so deliciously gorgeous outside! Just a touch above freezing, so the snow is rapidly melting, but it's still there in large swaths and patches. Squishy wet, spring snow.

 

 

 

Ed and I are taking a walk along our favorite trail in our local county park. He picks up a handful of snow and allows it to melt in his mouth. Eat some, he tells me. Then remember it when we walk here in the summer. I do. And I will.

I comment that the sunshine against the patches of white snow very much reminds me of my Alpine hikes last week. 

It is like an Alpine meadow here, isn't it... he muses. How lucky we are to have this around the corner.

Indeed.

I feel especially lighthearted because I managed to load and start my new computer (to replace the old ones, including my trusty-no-more travel laptop) by myself. Of course, how hard is it to park your old one near your new one, to punch a few buttons and watch the information flow magically through the air from one to the next.

Technology is like magic these days -- this from Ed again. We're lucky to be living in these times.

There it is again, that word that I surely hear a lot (and embrace wholeheartedly): lucky.

All this after breakfast of course...

I had already been out to look for the chickens who had wandered off somewhere, intoxicated by the sunshine, by the palpable coming of spring.

And while the information was flying from one computer to the next, I baked blueberry muffins. Blueberries! Not Alpine, but still magically available, likely from South America. How incredible is that...

In the afternoon, guess what! It's Snowdrop pick up from school time once more! Mask-less at school, as of last week.

Happy and impishly playful.

As are her brothers.

(Is Sandpiper too young for Swiss chocolate?)

Ravishing moments. Made even better with so much luck...

And love.

in between

Well that was weird good luck! Storms and tornadoes just before my flight landed in Madison, turning into a snow event a few hours after I came home. So that today, I woke up to a beautiful layer of snow. over the farmette lands.

Not skiable snow. Too wet for that. Still, in put me back in thought to the mountains.

 

 

 

The mountains came fully to me several times today. At breakfast, I opened a jar of sapin honey: that's from the pine forests of the Rhone-Alpes region of France. There's really no reason to bring a jar of honey home, except that that word sapin on the jar makes me smile. (And I lit a candle that has the scent of a "Montana forest." I cannot tell the difference between the scent of a Montana forest and a Morzine forest, so -- good enough!)

Ed came down sleepily. 

 

 

 

We caught up in the way that I just couldn't last night. I dozed off at least three times in mid-sentence and finally at midnight I gave up and went to bed.

Today isn't a day worth describing in greater detail here, except that it was in fact a good day for me, with small exchanges and lots of chores, but in my view, small exchanges are not nothing! And I chatted to my doc who applauds enthusiastically my desire to seize this time to travel. We talked about my next trip and the one after that and she confessed that she'd been scheming about ambitious trips for her family as well. We all need to scheme to fill our lives with all that we regard as important. 

At home, I am back to cooking dinners and planning menus for the week and by now I know this about myself: travel does not plunge me into greater cooking ambition when I return home. This time, I thought vaguely about baking something with blueberries, but in the end, I let the memory of all those tarts stick within that part of my brain that controls my reserves of smiling activity. Anytime I need to muster up a grin, I'll think of those tarts. No need to bake any at home. [Too, just because some food was my favorite, doesn't mean that everyone here will now regard it as theirs as well. Indeed, I used to bake blueberry tarts a while back. The popular consensus was that apple or raspberry or even strawberry were better. Preferably with creme patisserie and a delicate crust. But that was then. Fruit tarts don't stay grand long enough for me to bake them for just Ed and me. Crust gets soggy after a day or two.]

In the evening I wrote two reviews of hotels I stayed in. That's usually my end chapter of a trip: leave a few good words of praise where praise is due. And the candle burned and Ed made pop corn and we felt grateful for all that we have here every day of our lives.

With love...