market watch

I like movement. My own, sure, but also of those around me. Man, watch her navigate that street! Look at that guy push his way to the front!

Markets are the best for this. No one is still, life is not boring.

For a farmer, I suppose selling food is almost restful. Compared to planting, tilling, reaping, this is easy stuff.

For me (and yes, I have said this before, numerous times), there’s something immensely beautiful in that final act of presenting the produce. Here it is, I'm showing it off for you, the best of the best.






Just a few photos today. My daughters are distracting me (in the best ways!) and so I’m hardly remembering that I have a camera banging my hip during the market runs. The one above and the next two down are from the Westside Community Market and the last two are from the Farmers’ Market on the Square. All are of women farmers, or their daughters. A coincidence? Possibly. Or could it be that they struck me as especially beautiful this week, the week of daughters?

a thousand bugs

I am a newcomer to Wisconsin. Barely twenty-five years old. A babe. Newly partnered. Married even. Still working on my dissertation (never to finish working on my dissertation, but I do not know this at the time).

We are renting an apartment just at the edge of west Madison. Cornfields outside. (These days there are endless suburban homes growing in the once fertile corn soil.)

It’s August. Watch that corn grow!

The night is warm. We’re young, we stay out later than one would now.

But eventually we roll back to our wee little apartment, with the view of endless sky.

Turn key in lock, open door, look up. A million bugs cover the ceiling. Grain gnats, I call them, but who know what they are. They moved in by way of the small openings in the screen. This is their home. I am the outsider.


Almost thirty years have passed since that day with the bugs.

I am in my condo now.





Daughters, born, schooled, departed, are now back home on a brief visit.

The condo is almost finished. Almost almost. But there are no screens on my large glass doors.

Night is cool, the sound of crickets is so enticing. I crack the door to the fantastic balcony and doze.

Near midnight, I wake up. A thousand, no, a million bugs cover the spotlighted ceiling. Baby mosquitoes? Flies? Who are you? What are you doing here?

I’m not proud of swatting them, but swat I do. For hours. I knock down and break things (good bye ceramic woman of Russia), I wipe up bug corpses, I leave splotches on the freshly painted ceiling and walls.

Mosquitoes, flies, grain gnats. There is no such thing as a pristine wall, a clean slate, an untarnished surface. Not for long, anyway.

Of course, I can just keep the glass door closed after the sun sets...

friends and lovers

Biking to work. Hot, hot now, to the point that grasses appear permanently stuck in ther yellowness.

Pause by the lake. France? No, Madison.





After teaching, I’m there again, by the lake. Looking at the familiar Madison Union Terrace tables and chairs. And people, engrossed in each other (can’t be the food) leaning into them, right there, by the water.





Pick up a box (okay, four boxes) of sushi in the early evening and head west, to Spring Green. American Players Theater – we have been going there for years. And years. (Remind you of Central Park’s outdoor theater?)

Two people (each with white hair) walk down to the stage. They hold hands.





The show starts. Shakespeare. Much Ado About Nothing. Why hadn’t I ever noticed how mean Claudio is to his beloved? I notice now. Her tears, her frustration.

We drive back in that familiar string of returning cars. In the forty minute ride back to town, the ipod is plugged into the ancient tape recorder of the car and familiar stuff comes on. We’re used to singing together, daughters and I.

Such a bright moon ahead, just over the road.

For I can’t help, falling in love with you...

how to impress the urbane urbanites without really trying

They come for their handful of vacation days home to Madison.

They have become big city women. Their homes are in D.C. and in Boston. I am the small town kid now. I woo them back here with the smell of meadow flowers and the sounds of evening music on the Square.

The day is hot. I finish teaching. We set out on a seventeen mile bike loop along the southern borders of Madison.

It never fails to shake up a city slicker – how quickly Madison, the town, sheds its urban veneer and turns into splendid countryside.



the beginning of the bike loop



a mile or two later...


They have done this loop before, but they ooh and ah and laugh as butterflies circle their faces and birds provide an ongoing soundtrack of the best country music.





In the evening, we sit at a table and munch on crab salad and trout served on roasted summer corn. The Chamber Orchestra is finishing its season. We are finishing a week of bliss.





Happy birthday, little S.! To another great year for you in the nation’s capital, from one who watches you proudly from a small green corner here, in Wisconsin’s capital.

the ride in

Last week I grabbed rides and took the bus. Today, I biked to work.

Oh, I knew it would be good. I know my paths. Swing behind Borders, turn into Shorewood, not much traffic and then – you are by the lake. Morning light, dipping tree branches, water flowers, the occasional boats.

Tell me you would not like to pass this every day on your way to work:

real?

Well, yes. It's a pot, with flowers. It's on my balcony table. It has the colors of the Mediterranean.

ButI'm forced to hide behind it. Work. Teaching, this week.

I'm here, but necessarily, I'm (temporarily) preoccupied. Hiding. But not out of sight.

(note: the plant is real; the rest? only a reflection)

from behind the willow

It’s my favorite photo, of the dozen or so that I took today (I know, a paltry amount; it says something about the nature of my day).

Why?

I like the idea right now of being hidden, peering from within.

two markets and an airport

It wasn’t until 3 at night that the last of the weary travelers arrived at the condo. Her suitcase came later. Or, rather, before anyone was up, I drove to our airport to retrieve it.

I mention this because the episode speaks so much to the kind of place I live in. Flights get delayed or canceled. Suitcases don’t necessarily travel with you. The airport is within a hiccup of where I live. And as you approach the terminal, you see not hangars and warehouses and car rental barracks. You see this:





Naturally, by mid morning I am ready for the Saturday markets.

I have two markets just outside my door. I choose the Westside Community market for today (the other, the Hilldale market, gets my business Wednesdays morning). And for old times sake, I also scoot down to the Madison Farmers' Market at Capitol Square.

We’re market nuts, all of us. We go because of the quality foods, sure, and we go for that stubborn adherence to the fresh and honest: what we buy got ripped from the fields just this morning, yes, of course. It better have been.

And then, there’s that link to the soil. A personal connection to it (via the farmer). It makes us feel better about the lives we lead – disassociated as we are from producing much of anything except paper and ideas and most often not even that.

We take the produce out of the framer’s hand and it’s almost as good as getting dirt under our own nails, except you don’t have to scrub your hands and apply lotion to any calluses afterwards.

So it’s curious that, at the Westside Community Market, the one right outsied my door, I should first go not to the farmers’ stands, but to the booth with Potter’s crackers. The young cracker guy was so enthusiastic about his crackers last week (consider: roasted corn and onion, or basil walnut pesto, or rhubarb cinnamon…) that it all rubbed off on me. I positively skipped the whole way home after eating his crackers. It's like getting a massage: the glow lasts for a whole ten, fifteen minutes afterwards! (Only it's cheaper to go with the crackers than with a massage. )




And there are other bakers at this market – a whole little band of them who do scones and muffins better than anyone else in town.

I do not neglect the real stuff either. The stuff that grows and causes nails to get dirty. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Flowers. I pick carefully. It all must look good, smell good and the sellers must appear like they’ll recognize me six months hence.









The downtown market, on the other hand, is familiar ground. I feel like it’s a child that has become famous and there’s nothing left to do but check in and say hi every now and then. Maybe ask for an autograph. These guys are doing well, here, on the Square!

No matter. A quarter of a century of market going in Madison has pushed me there, downtown, and I am not likely to turn my back on it all simply because I have a market now just outside my door. There are many hours in a Saturday morning. And one can never have too many market experiences. Hands stay clean. Refrigerator is full, flower vases are stocked for the week.

painters

Two of them. Not the kind that paint houses. Canvases. They don’t know each other and neither has met me, but we’re friends.

They’re Ocean readers – and so they know far more of my life than I of theirs.

A year ago I complained to one (lili) that I could not imagine her because I hadn’t a clue as to what she looked like. The next week I got in the mail a sketch she had done of herself.

Yesterday, the other (dande) sent me a couple of prints of his paintings. As a housewarming gift. Stunningly gorgeous.

None of my friends (the kind that I actually have met) paint canvases. Some dabble in photography; hey, the whole world now dabbles in photography – you practically can’t help it, every gadget you get has some pixel or other attached to it.

But lili and dande actually put paint to canvas and the results adorn galleries and great spaces.

It struck me how important these two have become in my days. Sometimes I write a post with one or the other in mind, though they don’t know it, nor is it entirely obvious, if they should be reading.

Their words – in comments and longer emails -- are songs to me, coming as they do from their artistic souls. I listen to them carefully, I think about what they have to say.

This post is for the two of you – lili and dande. With thanks.

(the photos are a study of one bee today, making her way through the flowers on my balcony)

home

I went back to the loft this afternoon, handed over the keys and said good bye.

No big, protracted spin through the two years there. No last photos of dusty interiors. No pausing to take one final whiff of warehouse air. None of it.

I was matter of fact: here are the keys. I want my deposit. Good bye.

But moving is more heady than that. You’re out of that place now. What memories are pounding away at you? What love do you recall? What pain?

I go over to the waterfront – just a few steps (the loft is near Madison’s southern lakes). Fishermen. My best buds! (I know none of them, nor they me). I’ve loved you in the summer, I’ve loved you all winter long (it’s unreciprocated – they really do not know who I am)! I’ll miss you every waking minute of my condo days!




(Surely an exaggeration)... Sigh...


I’m done with the move. Boxes unpacked, feet up, computers on. Tomorrow, my daughters are flying over to inspect the place.

Restless. I drive to the quiet of the meadows and fields. The sun is low now. A few clouds, open fields, a band of sunflowers, standing tall on this hot, dry evening.




Back at the condo now. I hear a knock on the door. Come up to the rooftop. We’re just talking and watching the lightening move across the sky.

I go up with a glass of rosé and talk for an hour, another hour, until my eyes cannot take it anymore. I drift in and out of the back and forth. Shadows create perfect images of our little circle, there around the twelth floor table.




I have moved. Finally.

the day's chores

One person may be so intensely preoccupied with lecture preparation that she may not have the time to write long posts this week.

...Even though she thinks nothing of getting up early, so very early, before her morning class early, to go to the Hilldale market, where another person, considerably smaller, younger, and with a more charming array of tasks, is engaged in sorting through flowers.





Meanwhile, on campus, someone turned the sprinkler on the lawns of Bascom Hill. We are so dry here, in Madison! So dry! Who appreciated this most? Maybe these guys, who suddenly find themselves in close proximity to their beloved mud. For slinging, I guess. Children arrange bouquets of flowers, wasps sling mud. It's in the nature of things.

changes

Stay away long enough, and you’ll appreciate how the world moves forward in your absence.

Take State Street. It’s been a while since I walked down Madison’s pseudo-pedestrian byway. (In my mind, any street that permits: buses, motorbikes, delivery vans, spaced-out drivers who think the rules do not apply to them – is not a pedestrian street proper. It is a mixed bag. State Street is a mixed bag)

I walk, I admire.

What, this Paris fad has made it to Madison? Can’t we adopt great baguettes and lunches with a glass of rosé wine instead?



I’m betting it wont catch on. Agreed?

work

As if the move didn’t wipe me out completely. Today, the week of summer teaching begins.

The Internet has redefined nearly everything I do. But nowhere have I felt its impact as much as in my job. I can now, for the most part, work at home (or in France, or in Greenland. Maybe not Greenland. Iceland for sure.) The cursed aspect of it is that it all happened after my kids were grown.

But, teaching requires a hike to campus and today I started practicing that hike from my new abode. I can walk (a tad long). I can bike (a tad lazy today). I can take the bus. So many options! Thrilling, really. None require the use of a car. Fantastic.

I get to campus late. The afternoon sun has been a fixture here, in the Midwest for days. Weeks, even. I haven’t experienced rain in Madison at all this summer. (Irrelevant comment: I’ve been away; relevant comment: I’ve been here for a while now.) It’s such a pretty sight – a quiet campus, with only the occasional hard working student, taking her late day readings outside.





Oh, wait. She’s engrossed alright. Relishing the light, the moment of stillness. But note the telltale sign of orange on the cover. She’s found her quiet spot to take out the book (HP).

I’m not a Potter nut, but I love hoopla in principle, so much so that I would have been at Borders watching all the craziness at midnight last Friday, except that I fell asleep.

Read on, ye woman of Potter. What better way is there to spend a warm, July late afternoon?

uninvited guests

They’re what makes your day move forward, the economy grow and your unfinished mess get kicked under the bed. What more could you want in life.

Mine were especially welcome. I have grown weary with the packing and unpacking deal. I have lost my sense of the appropriate. Sometimes I am not even rational. I pick up a clock, look at it, toss it with a shrug into the waste bin. Time should not matter.

And still, there is the loft to clean, the condo to organize, the class to teach -- the usual plethora of unfascinating activities, ones I must not lose track of.

But the uninvited guests change things for me. I turn on an internal engine for them. I rush. I get things done.


It is the hour of the visit. They come, they admire (so sweet), they place a special bottle in my new wine cooler. They leave. I look around me and there is not a box in sight. Pristine, almost. Wouldn’t you say? A corner of my personal heaven.




Oh, the paintings aren’t up and there are stacks of this and that most everywhere (and please do not look under any functional piece of furniture), but there are also neat, empty spaces which demonstrate resolve on my part to make this not an embarrassment but an opportunity to surge forward and present well.

If you're looking for something productive to do with your evening, become an uninvited guest. If I know and trust you I'll give you the special elevator code. And I'll love you forever. Really.

markets

Waking up in a new city is better than great. Get going. Explore. Breakfast in a café! Fantastic.

Waking up in my new condo is not significantly different. It’s six! In an hour the market opens. Right across the street. Reason enough to live here.

I go early. Before the official opening at 7.

I take pictures. The sun is just touching the tent tops.


And then I get a scold. Don't take pictures without persmission!

Whose? In anticipation of the perfect shot?

We have a brief exchange, but it is pointless. I never argue much with people who find themselves within range of my camera without wanting to be there, even if I have all the rights under the sun conferred upon me.

But it caused me to consider this: when I was in Nice, a million otherss were there with me. Most everyone eventually made it to the market. 99% took photos. Imagine a vendor shooing away someone with a camera! Can't be done. You'd spend all your time alianating the bulk of your crowd.

On the other hand, take a village in Brittany and you, the photographer, are on thin ice. For instance, don't even try to chase photos of meat vendors. And do not elbow your way past crowds who are buying. Or else.

The market across the street from me here, in Madison, is like Brittany. The market on the Square is like Nice. So I guess I am back in northern France. Only the sun is hot and the people are speaking only English.

(setting up)









(watching)







(selling)

the week of The Move: condo love

Truth is, I love it here. No really, I am blushing inside. I love my switch to this place.

Late last night, I paid the two men (with their truck), gave them one last gulp of organic raspberry juice (they never tasted anything so good, I am told) and went looking for food. The restaurant orbit changes here. The east side is farther. The west side, my home of two years back, I still regard as a smudge on the culinary map of Madison. A Chipotle’s burrito will do. With several glasses of champagne – a gift from my builder.

Everything feels new. The way the light falls on the couch, on the computer. Wow. Stunning. The way the brushed steel hasn’t been touched a million times with olive-oil saturated fingertips. The way the channels don’t match the previous ones, so that Tour de France is no longer on 28 or anywhere else.

Ah, but newness is good.

The carefully configured corner, from which I am now writing.



And, waking up to contemplate the view from my bed for the next months. (This:)




To walk to the grocery stores. To meet neighbors. All that is good.

I unpack slowly, deliberately. I don’t mind discovering deficiencies (four cabinets—no interiors. Oops.). It’s part of moving here: it’s new, the interiors are fresh.

My balcony door is open. I listen to melodies played on a harp. One of my neighbors who teaches harp, moves her instrument outside to practice.



Why would anyone not like it here?
Ed says: the place reminds me of the buildings I so happily moved away from in New York.

Does it?




Okay Ed. Those are your devils.

Me, I don’t feel one way or another about highrise trappings. Indeed, some are sublime.

And I have to smile at the fact that my condo building is considered a highrise on the Madison skyline. It is 12 stories tall.



I take a moment off from unpacking. I walk over to the store, pick up a copy of our local weekly, the Isthmus. An unexpected surprise – a photo I had sent on a lark (one from this day – guess which one?) got a prize. Good sign. My photos are doing okay. I’m doing okay.

And from the rooftop, where neighbors gather each evening, the view is not all that removed from what I left at the loft. So there.




Ah, love.

the week of The Move: …and a truck

Packing, finally. Stacking cardboard boxes. People like me, who have collected cooking paraphernalia all their lives, have a tough time of it. There sure is a lot of stuff. All fragile. I feel like packing none of it.

Moving is a lonely business. And sometimes it feels especially lonely.

I call Ed and convince him that any dating material on the planet would not go out biking when the other was packing, stacking and generally feeling exhausted by life.

Ed comes over, we eat sushi, watch the Tour de France. Up and down, pedals go up and down. I zonk out.

And suddenly it is midnight. I need to be up and packing, I am wishing it to be ten days from now.

At 2:30 at night we drive the pick-up to the condo. A load of fragile stuff that I do not want to box.

It’s Ed’s first visit to the finished condo (and perhaps only second or third visit there at all). He mumbles something about it having entertaining potential and retreats to the balcony.

Yes, I know it -- Ed hates the condo. I try very very hard not to mind.

In the morning, I close the deal. I am a condo owner.

The movers come. Nice guys. I ply them with organic raspberry juice which they tell me is the best on the planet, the best, the best, almost as good as the tip they will be getting from me.

Two men and a truck. Plus one woman and a truck, for I have borrowed Ed’s pick up to take over things that I just do not feel like packing.

It is a long day.

A very long day.

Wish I had slept some.

Truth is, though, I love the small little condo. It is mine not only because it is mine, but because it has just me fumbling all over it. So that it bears my mistakes. My shortcomings.

Two men and a truck. Me and a truck. Out of the loft. Into my new space.

the week of The Move: the last supper

Wednesday take out. Pots are packed. No food in the fridge. I go to Edo’s on Park – sushi. I want sushi for my last meal in my downtown life, even though the NYT beat up on us, the undiscerning sushi eaters, just a few days ago.

But I take the NYT admonition seriously. I sit at the bar and watch the cooks, so that they can engage me, tell me about the fish they have available for the day… Okay, none of this “engagement” happens. But I sit and watch, even though I know the sushi will be the same, whether I watch or not.





Back at the loft. Pack and run. Soon. Not yet

I can’t remember now the last night in the family home (from where I moved two years ago). Did I sleep? Did I look out at my perennial beds one last time? And wish that the new owners would take them to heart?

How did I leave? In the morning? Happy to be done with packing? Terrified that none of the move would proceed smoothly?

And now? Why would I miss an apartment that was mine for two years only?

What will I miss most? Sometimes I think it is the closeness to the water. I never put a single toe into the lakes downtown, but I watched these peaceful bodies of water frame the gracious capitol of ours and always, the sight would make me smile.





But truthfully, that’s not it. I’ll miss the feeling of hope.

I called my Chicago friend and asked – how is it that I managed to get it all here, to the loft, two years ago? I feel so overwhelmed now…

He reminded me: you were so excited, so enthused then.

I was so excited, so enthused then. I’m not any of that now.

Everyone has an image and a reality. The most productive people, the most creative ones never let the latter catch up. I’m thinking that they live in the image. And perhaps in time, that image takes more and more characteristics of the every day, so that it is a blur, so that it all becomes indistinguishable.

I got so carried away by an image and then it became a bust: it’s not possible. Not any of it. So it’s back to the grindstone.

I’ll miss the loft because it was so removed from past mishaps. A lofty loft. Where friends were best friends. And life was to be reinvented. And then, I proceeded to live in the way that one lives: by falling into more mishaps.

But, the capitol dome was always visible. I’ll miss it.

the week of The Move: fifteenth

I suppose this isn’t huge by American standards: my fifteenth move, big deal. I have friends my age in Poland who have only moved twice in their lives: out of their family home to a small place of their own and then, when they felt more prosperous, what with a market economy and the spirit of capitalism, to a second place, bigger and better than the first. That’s it.

My moves resemble a board game – from one state of being to the next: up the ladder, down again, up up and then plunge. And now, settling into a space that I regard as up, but within a very tiny enclosure. So that if you take the Edwards’ new home and divide it into 25 little homes, one of them should overlap with the likes of mine. [Of course, there’s more of them, but I do accommodate family reunions, at which time we are almost equal in number. But for the live-in help. I haven’t live-out help, let alone a parlor maid or whatever else it is that the wealthy find indispensable.]

In travel, I love packing to go and hate unpacking on the return. In moving, I hate packing and am okay with opening boxes and hiding things in closets.

This is why once more, instead of attending to the packing, I placed myself on my condo balcony, where I built an blue tiled table that doesn’t really match with much of anything else there and I stuffed two more Italian clay pots with even more perennials (shhhh!!!). I swept the spilled dirt down below, appreciating the fact that I am on one of the lower floors (aka cheaper units) and so I cannot offend anyone with my showers of dirt.





Oh! And let me explain to those in the dark about condo life. We condo inhabitants, we do not have apartment numbers. That’s for lesser mortals. I learned this the hard way: every time I filled out change of address form, the system bounced back my address as not “apt. 308” but “unit 308.” We live in units. And yes, there is an omnipotent master of the condo universe who looks after things of this nature and makes sure condo people are well treated by important entities such as the postal service.

And, while I am on the subject of postal services, let me explain the real reason for my move: my soon to be inhabited condo has a concierge. It’s a classy sounding name for what is really a doorman in NY parlance, except for the fact that this dude actually sits the entire morning and opens no doors. But he does accept packages from UPS and postal types and for this I am grateful.

I must pack. To boxes now. Tour de France, keep me company. Thank you.