brilliant, with a bang!

Such a day! All sunshine and May colors. Light green, lime green, dainty yellow green. A few flowers.

 

But could it be that they are overshadowed by the entirety? By the brilliant entirety?

 

(Tuxie, the sheep shed cat is hiding out in the flower field. Still not used to our visiting Polish engineer.)

Ed asks -- you want to go to Finca Cafe for breakfast?

I do!

He has some papers to notarize at a next door bank. And though the fruit is ready for our at home breakfast, I put it off for later.

It seems the perfect moment for us to celebrate May, togetherness, those light green colors. He wants to take the motorcycle. That's a tad cold for me, but I am agreeable. We're both so agreeable! I huddle behind him for the short ride.

We used to come to Finca a lot, when they had good bakery items. These days they only bake sweet cheese quesadillas. They're okay, but still -- maybe next time we should go back to Paul's? Or the local Tati? The sky is the limit!

While he pops out to attend to his signatures, I study Shakespeare's the Tempest. Snowdrop is trying out for the Young Shakespeare Players ("YSP") summer production of it. How can we not be nostalgic? Once upon a time her mom played Alonso in YSP's the Tempest.  Snowdrop wants to read for Alonso as well.

If thou be’st Prospero,
Give us particulars of thy preservation;
How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
Were wrack’d upon this shore; where I have lost--
How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--
My dear son Ferdinand.

The auditions are tomorrow. YSP is an inclusive organization. You audition for a part you'd like, but you are guaranteed something, no matter how poor your performance. Most kids do very, very well in their roles. Only a few struggle with memorization (they have 2.5 months to learn it all). Ages? They work as a team, spanning elementary, middle and high school grade levels. My older daughter did it for four years in a row (my younger one -- three years), starting age 9 (my younger girl -- starting age 7). And now here we are. Repeating history with the Tempest.

Home again. A "second breakfast," on the porch.

The rest of the morning? Weeding, mowing a few tight corners with the hand mower. And chatting with our guest from Poland who is looking for a place to stay this summer, along with his wife and their newborn. Well, soon to be newborn. 

And here's a return to something I'd abandoned due to the garden work: Ed and I go for our bike loop. I dont think I've biked since... March! Such a different landscape now!

The kids are here after school of course.

But our routines are off a bit. Snowdrop is practicing her lines for tomorrow's audition. 

 

 

 

And of course, there is the usual Friday lesson run. A bit nostalgic there as well, because though Sparrow still has a few violin lessons to go this year, Snowdrop is finishing up ballet today. It's family observation time.  The jury is out on whether she will return to ballet in the Fall. She likes it, but is that a marker of anything? Is there a class that she doesn't like? Okay, she snubbed soccer. Nonetheless, she has competing interests and ballet may have to recede for a while (forever?). So I'm nostalgic about watching this last dance class of hers.

But I never get to see it. I dont get to go to ballet, Sparrow doesn't get to go to his violin lesson either.

I'm driving up a busy road to deposit the little guy with dad and violin at his class. Almost there now. I need to make a left turn onto a side street. The cars coming from the opposite direction stop to let me through. I wave in appreciation. I'm nearly done with my turn and a car pulls into the parking lane and zips forward, crashing into me. How did he not see me? Why was he passing in the parking lane on the right? Unanswerable questions. (Unfortunately, the driver did not speak English. But he did talk up a storm to the police, who used Google translate to get some coherent story. I think his version was that he was in the proper driving lane. In any case, there were witnesses who called the police (thank you, civic minded people!!!) so I should not have problems. Ed asked -- did you get witness names of the cars that stopped for you? I did not. I was too busy calming screaming kids. The noise had been deafening.

In the end, parents came, took both kids, I stayed and waited for the police to file their report, then drove home. Ed tested the car for drivability (I have a more official check on it on Monday). The dents speak for themselves. His advice -- dont fix them! Scratched cars are more fun to drive! I had to smile at that.

 

Evening. Different, too, from the usual. We have our young Polish engineer over for a Thai supper. I'm not the cook, so the prep is limited to putting out plates and drinks. Our guest is delightful and positive and super pleasant to have with us for this short while.

So ends a full day, a brilliant day, an exasperating day! Tomorrow? Possibly fuller, possibly more brilliant! Less exasperating, please!

with love...

rainy day work

And we have another wet day today. Good for the garden. (Also good for the weeds.) Good for staying indoors. (Even though I planned on doing my seasonal moving of farmette lands which are sporting, in some places, nearly waist high grasses right now.) 

I walk to the barn quickly, barely pausing to take note of how the old faves are doing.

Now is the time for transition flowers to appear. They're the late spring bloomers and they help keep you sane before the summer bounty comes alive. There are the allium globes -- a predictable and reliable May and June flower...

 

 

 

... and then there is the less predictable Spanish Bluebell. I introduced a mix of colors last October and the first ones to pop open are the white ones.

And the lilac? Still bending its wet branches, still fragrant and beautiful. For another day or two.

We eat breakfast inside. Cozy. Oatmeal. It seems right for a rainy day but I tell you, it doesn't compare to a croissant! I'm too old to be so totally focused on the healthier of the two! Tomorrow, it's back to croissants.

Rainy day tasks. All indoors. Most on the couch. Many phone calls attendant to my mother's schedule and care. Ed's old college friends stop by, but I stay to the side of that encounter. Too much to do. Always too much to do!

But here's a nice surprise -- the rain passes, the kids come out of school to a clearing sky. 

Can we stop at Culver's for french fries? They always ask. Always.

I said once a week and we've already done two trips this week! (Once you break your resolve, it's downhill all the way.)

We'll make a deal! (This from Snowdrop, the supreme deal maker.) We wont ask for Culver's fries or ice cream again if on the last week of school we can have one or the other, every day!

Hmmmm.

Deal!

 

 

At the farmhouse, we read, but with many interruptions. The phone rings every few minutes, all relating to care adjustments for my mother. It is what it is. The kids are patient, eventually giving up on the reading in favor of play as I finish up with the calls.

In the evening, I get up on the tractor-mower and I mow. It's not great to cut fields of long grass and weeds when they're damp from the rains, but nor do I want to use a good weather day for what I think of as a yukky job. Dinner -- reheated chili -- is very, very late.

Tomorrow, it'll be me and the post-rain weeds. In good weather. I promise, it will be lovely! It always is.

cycle of flowers

It's like a bike ride through seasonal change. A long bike ride. Every few days we come to a new destination. The starting point? Crocus land. Soon after -- daffodils, with side spins to the villages of helleborus and hyacinth. We passed many Syberian squill. Blue with cold and envy as towering tulips overshadowed them. And speaking of blue, remember our pause along Virginia Bluebell lane? 

Then came the big ones: the orchard blooms, followed by the megalopolis herself -- the crab apple. We weren't quite out of her territory before we reached the lilacs.

 

 

We're still with the lilacs now, but it wont be for long. I see allium heads everywhere and peonies on the horizon. And yes, the occasional iris has cropped up along the way. And today, I saw the early Clematis: white, gorgeous, huge.

We leave one behind only to face the abundance of another. And so it continues, until the last aster fades in October, the white flowers of Calamintha have said goodbye to the once hovering bees, the tall spider lily has won the race with the almost as tall phlox.

Yes, there is a wistfulness in gardening. You have to say a lot of goodbyes. It will be hard, for example, to wake up to the last full lilac presentation. Maybe it's today, maybe it's on the weekend. You can't tell for sure. Yet you're always looking forward to the next pause with the next flower species. Perhaps this is the best part of perennial gardening: you strive to live in the moment, but you know damn well that there's excitement ahead too. Goodbye asparagus, hello strawberries! (Actually we have just entered asparagus season. A big yay to one of my very favorite vegetables which, like corn, tastes best when it's freshly harvested.)

It was a very early morning for me. A dental appointment. Nothing consequential. We mostly chatted about knee replacements (my dentist just had his second one). Still, it meant that I had to do the morning walk very early. The good of it -- the garden is magnificent in the morning light!

Breakfast is late, but on the porch. Beautiful and indulgent. When Ed says -- let's go take a look at the vegetable patch, I retort -- please, let's just sit here for a while. It's so rare that I am not in a rush!

We then do go out to look at the veggie fields. Once upon a time I tried planting a fuller vegetable garden here, but the soil was so darn awful that it was, I felt, a waste of time. Yes, tomatoes do well, with added compost, but the lettuces (so hard to save from visiting animals), the radishes, the carrots? Forget it. Still, this year Ed convinced me to try again. The soil is much improved after years of chipping and covering with fabric. The weeds aren't gone, but they're on the retreat. He's already planted the baby artichokes and melons and cukes. He showed me spaces between strips of fabric for my lettuce and carrot seeds.

I'm not convinced that any of it will thrive. We don't have fencing. We don't have raised beds. We don't have great soil (it's better, but it's not great). It's a distance from the farmhouse so I don't have an eye on its progress, its watering needs. 

And yet.

Gardening, as I have said before, is for the optimists among us. The planting wont be even and neat and compact and pretty, but I can give it a try -- in the crooked rows between pieces of fabric. I mean, why not. Three carrot varieties, a radish, a romaine and two radicchios.

Because we did get rain yesterday, the weeds are again trying to push through in the flower fields, so I try to stay on top of that as well. All that belongs to my morning and early afternoon.

 

Afterwards, I have to attend to my mother, who is being moved from the hospital where she was being treated for some muscle pain, to the rehab center where the hope is she will regain some of her strength so that she can return to her Assisted Living unit. I have no more to add to this (for now). It's a process and it's something I need to work on because, well, that's the way it is. My mother is not a happy camper in the best of times and she is certainly not one at the moment and though I have no illusion that she will magically take on happy camper traits in the week ahead, the goal for her has to be to reach the same state that she was in before she pulled a muscle.

Because of this, I had to bow out of helping with the kids this afternoon. The parents took over while I concentrated on the job of signing papers and fetching stuff she wanted from her apartment.

 

Evening. I make my way to the grocery store. I'm trying to keep this down to once a week and it's sort of working. It's a perfect thing to do after taking care of things over at the Rehab Center. I find the aisles of my grocery store to be happy places. Cheerfully full of fresh produce, flowers even. 

And then home. Ed is biking, so the normally quiet farmette lands are extra quiet. [We have noticed that because the new development lots are small, no one uses power mowers. In the suburbs, their roar is a weekend constant. Here, we never hear them. Well, except for our one neighbor. He's old school. That's fine. He tries to keep his space tidy and has great patience with the likes of us, who rarely mow and do not use weed control chemicals or fertilizers on our grasses.]

Evenings are beautiful here, especially now, before we start fretting about mosquitoes. I stay on the porch for a long while and just listen. To the birds (so many! This is what my app tells me -- in the space of two minutes, the following visited our farmette lands: the American Robin, Northern Cardinal, Red-winged Balckbird, Tree Swallow, American Crow, House Sparrow, Chimney Swift, Song Sparrow, Eastern Wood-Pewee, Chipping Sparrow, Common Grackle, Brown-headed Cowbird, Black-capped Chickadee, Cedar Waxwing, European Starling, and the House Wren). And in between all that music, there is that beautiful silence. Because birds do that to you -- they quiet all that's within your head.

Dusk. Ed's back. Can I get you some watermelon?

with love...

rainy day

Thank goodness it rained. Watering crisis averted! All plants received some water. Perhaps not enough, but still, it gave them a thirst quenching lift.

My walk to the barn is stormy! I'm not one to head out when there is lightening, but the hens needed to be freed and fed and I needed a fresh bundle of lilies-of-the-valley for the breakfast table. And, too, I love looking at the lilac in full bloom, when it is drooping with rain!

It's a different side of a garden -- the wet one that hides secrets from the casual passerby. 

 

 

 

In a strange way, it reminds me of the first movie I went to see in New York when I moved there to be an au pair and to finish college -- the Garden of the Finzi-Continis.  It was the first time that I thought of a garden as a place that shelters, that keeps from view both the outside world to those within, and those within from the outside world. I had learned much about World War II in my last year of high school in Poland, but my focus had been a Polish one. The movie was almost like a start to my stepping out of that paradigm and into a broader one. Suddenly other stories, complicated ones, coming from complicated countries became important. In the movie, the story is of an Italian aristocratic Jewish family, as Fascism grips their country. It's a haunting movie that stays with me even now as I listen to the birds in the quietness of our own farmette garden and I look at the drooping flowers of the lilac bush.

Breakfast, at the kitchen table. With freshly picked lilies.

Rain. The plants needed water and I needed time away from the garden. My mom requires extra attention at the moment. She is in a downward spiral mood-wise and that does her no good. Indeed it's fair to say that it does no one any good. Figuring out how to deal with this takes time. At present she is not capable of making decisions for herself. That then falls on me.

Too, I return to lend a hand over at Steffi's House. This one:

My friend's project requires going forward with some choices and I'm good at that! I meet a bunch of people there for a consultation about windows. It turns out that this is one of the big decisions that you have to make when you buy a new house -- what will cover the windows? All sixteen of them here? My advice is simple: stick to neutral and keep the price down. The house already will eat up a chunk of money. Go easy on it!

And, too, I needed to catch up with my friend in Warsaw. I thought I could squeeze in a few morning minutes for a Zoom call but of course that's just impossible. I love our conversations too much to limit them to a few minutes.

Before very long it's time to pick up the kids. We never got the whopping winds nor the tornadoes that spun through the states to the south of us and for that I am very grateful, but oh my did the rains come down when the kids left the school! 

It was all very localized. By the time we got back to the farmette, the rains had stopped. Indeed, the downpour never touched our land. We had rain, but no downpour. What a difference a few miles makes!

(Today, he wants to listen to the war story with his sister...)

Stormy wet days are like that: you dont want to move too far away from where the others are hanging out.

 

And there you have it -- my rainy day. My beautifully wet rainy May day. 

a lilac Monday

What's the date today? Can you draw a cube? Face, velvet, church, daisy, red. What five words did I just say? Count back from 100, by seven. Repeat the following numbers. And now those five words again.

There, I've just given you some hints on how to ace the cognitive decline test. Because I did ace it and though I'm 71 and not 80, I can claim competence at sufficient levels to have me run for president, but for the fact that I don't much care for the job and am not qualified for it by virtue of having been born in Poland, among other things.

I agreed to the test while I was at a doc's office for something else. They say that they're trying to catch early dementia and Alzheimer's in people my age. It did lead me to wonder if I really want to ruin the rest of my decade by finding signs of possible decline. Would you want to know? Would I have felt compelled to tell you had I come in below 100%? Would you still read Ocean if you know its author was slipping?

All good questions! Going to doctors at my age is almost like going to music lessons -- there's no end in sight because they always think of other things they can test, which then leads you to consult with someone else, because my acing of the cognitive decline test to the contrary, at my age, you typically can expect to come in with subpar results somewhere along the line, and unraveling stuff is a forever thing. Ed doesn't engage the medical profession in this way and of course, the broader question then is -- why do I? It takes up time and today, I felt especially prickly about having to break up my morning because the day is just so beautiful! Here, follow along on my morning walk. It's the hour of the lilac, that's for sure!

(looking out the kitchen window...)

(the last tulip days...)

(allium coming into bloom: note the purple flower heads on long stems)

(the unbelievably awesome lilac, rewarding us for the three year pruning work we did on it)

(the early irises)

(but let's get back to the lilac!)

Breakfast, also with lilacs, on the porch.

We have another lilac -- a later blooming one, right behind the trash bins. It hasn't been doing well for years now and today I decided to do something about it and I guess I'm happy to have worked on it, but on the other hand, in digging around, I found a lot of rot in the trunk and root system. A metaphor for sure! Are we better off knowing that the lilac actually has a limited life span before it? On the flip side, I did dig out the rot and left behind some half healthy roots and branches and we put compost and chips on it and it's looking okay and maybe we will have saved it... Oh, the dilemmas forced upon us by nature!

More weed digging and pulling followed, but honestly, not too much because we are on the dry side of things. Weeds slow down when the rains stop. I'm hoping we're not headed for another drought this year! Watering plants can take even more time than digging up weeds. 

And soon it's time to pick up Snowdrop.

("the tulips smell great too!")

The entire afternoon is spent reading chapter after chapter of The Night War (the new novel by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley). It's a World War II story, but, too, it's a story about overcoming adversity and channeling your inner strength to get through tough times. Helping kids develop resilience has to be one of the more important things we can do. Perhaps listening to stories about children suddenly confronting harrowing wars and tough life choices can help in this. [Or it can lead to nightmares! Hard to say how much of this is too much. Snowdrop brought up Anne Frank on our evening car ride. Clearly this stuff is on her mind.]

I leave you with an evening lilac photo. Because this moment really does belong to that ephemeral, scented purple bloom.  

 

with love...

farmette Sunday

Oh, but I love those kids! The big two and their little guys. The two young families. Each day more, as I discover new little permutations on personality traits that are so familiar to me, yet always sprouting totally delightful new ideas, new ways of moving through the day!

Yeah, it was great to have them all together here. It's always great, but somehow, as I get older, it just gets greater.

Even though the day got off to a very early start. Too early! I woke up at 4 and tried to check off in my head all that I wanted to do for today's family brunch at the farmhouse. And it struck me that there's a lot on that list, and they're all coming on the early side, and, too, I wanted to bake, and my younger girl wanted to visit my mother in the hospital with me before our get together. I realized I needed to be up before my usual morning wake up hour. By 4:30 I was in the shower and a few minutes later I was up chasing the cats out and setting the table. And mixing the batter for this rhubarb cake. (Lilac and lily-of-the-valley, as well as the rhubarb, supplied by farmette lands)

A very quick walk outside, to admire those early rays of sunlight as they play with the flowers and grasses.

It's going to be a beautiful day!

Most of prep work done, I set out to pick up daughter. Our visit to the hospital is a bit of a bust because my mother had been grumpy this morning and so the staff helped her ease her displeasure with some calming meds. This zonked her out, so we saw my sleeping mother. Ah well, my daughter said it was important to stop by anyway, since she is not up here (from Chicago) so often and, well, my mother is 100 so opportunities for seeing each other are rare.

From there, we drive to pick up bakery items from Madison Sourdough (of course! my predictable favorite bread and croissant bakery in Madison), and then at Tati's Cafe in the new development to stock up on caffeine (and while there, we may as well drive by Steffi's House, because my girl is curious about stuff like that) and finally home, to the farmhouse, where just after 10:30 everyone gathers.

It's funny -- in my after-school care for the big two Madison kids, no one wants to play outside. Max five minutes and they clamor to come in. Today, at least four of the grandkids are itching to find dandelion puffs, to scamper away from adults across farmette fields. Well fine, it is a gorgeous day, but can you please pause for a photo? 

Thank you!

(so many violets to pick...)

 

 

 

 

(so many mowed trails to follow!)

I chase them further, to do a two family photo. This is important to me, and they know it, and everyone works hard to make it happen. Sure, it's tough to get nine people, with five of them under the age 10, to look their best in a group shot, but I think this one turned out okay!

This is when the bacon turned rather crispy in the oven, due to neglect.

(meanwhile, the big girls beg for hose time... I never say no to hose time... true, someone always gets wet, but still, it's worth it!)

 

No matter. Some people are fine with extra crispy bacon and other have plenty of other foods to choose from. Cheeper eggs with garden chives, some garden asparagus, some tomatoes, bakery items, cheeses, fruits. I do not ever forget how fortunate we are with our food selections.

(on the table: the violets picked by all the kids)

Brunch:

And after, the big kids want to go out once again. The youngest one, Juniper,  goes along for a tiny bit, but it's getting awfully close to her nap and there are still toys inside she hasn't explored.  She stays out long enough for one of the dads to take a photo that properly belongs to Mother's Day, so I'll post it, but in a week. 

(the kids, minus Juniper, escaping from the call of the adults!)

In the early afternoon, the youngest family heads southeast and the other guys head northwest. Me, I stay home to tidy, and to think sweet thoughts about these people that I love so very, very much! I had them all with me and it was grand!