so cold...

A student tells me – it’s the coldest September on record!
Enough that it’s a brutal slap in the face early in the morning as I’m riding Rosie to school today. I am so very grateful to Ed’s motorcycle friends (and by extension, my friends) who gave me their rider jacket – that little thing sends the wind flying elsewhere! (I can’t believe I’m using the thinsulate with it already. Forty-two degrees on the thermometer outside and that's before you factor in the wind on the scooter.)

I am trying to get up very early so that my evenings are free of work. It’s awful to make such deals with yourself because when you then do get up very early, by evening you’re dead to the world. Who cares if your plate is clean of work. Your plate has also slipped to the floor while you doze on the couch,

Isis and Ed continue to enjoy retirement and I wish them well. I’m not jealous. Who needs free time. Hard work builds character, my mother always said. (Or was it Lenin?)

I took a “first day of school” photo before I hopped on Rosie this morning. Not of me setting out – couldn’t do that, and Ed was too busy pulling a warm quilt to his chin (after sweetly rising to eat breakfast with me). But of the farmette – to remember what it is that I come home to in the late late afternoon. Hi farmette, bye farmette, see you later, farmette, I’ve got great minds to stimulate. Or something.





It is evening, I am home. Hi tomatoes, good night tomatoes.

faces of labor

If I said I cooked, cleaned and worked today, would it seem that I had an unspectacular Labor Day holiday?
If I added that the day was crispy splendid, that the meal was a pleasure to prepare and that cleaning the farmhouse made it all spiffy and ready for the year ahead, wouldn’t that sound like a day well spent?

All in the telling. Fact is, I had a wonderful day. My daughter kept me company while I baked and Ed fixed a dented John Deere. I rolled out the buttermilk strawberry scones, made the dough for the apple frangipane galette (apples from our tree) and prepared the strawberries for the frozen strawberry yogurt.





I cooked potatoes and chopped tomatoes (from our plants) and prepared the shrimp for the salad on the side. The corn was terrific, the brats were my favorites (with chicken meat and hot peppers).

And let's not forget the people. My daughter, her friends and so too, by extension, my friends. Ed behaved, Isis kept to the side, the cool air added a touch of autumn to the evening.





Such a good finale.

Now, let me tuck the last dish away and pull out pages of notes. Fall's here. I have three classes to teach tomorrow.

not elephants

The sky cleared, well, mostly it cleared...





It was time to get the farmette ready for fall. Brush removal, yes, that.  Weeding, lots of weeding. Pruning too. All day long.





And in pruning around the pear tree, Ed discovered these:





They grew! The wine caps grew!

Ed, it’s been raining. There are mushrooms everywhere. How do you know they’re your mushrooms?

They totally fit the description and I planted them here!

They could be different, poisonous mushrooms.

They’re wine caps. Let me cook them!

Cook one. Just one.

(Five minutes later, Ed’s outside, frying pan in hand.)
Try it!

You try it.

I did. Have this piece.
(I do.)

We should wait for 24 hours before we eat more.

Why?

To see what happens.

We don't eat any more today, even though I know that they are good mushrooms. Once, a long time ago, a doctor, one of my favorite doctors, told me I did not have some dreaded disease. How do you know, I asked then. How do you know?
Well, if you hear hoof beats and you’re in Wisconsin, you think -- horses. Not elephants.

So, the tree didn’t fall during the storm, the bear didn’t maul, the moped stayed steady. And the mushrooms? Eight hours later, still breathing. Wine caps. How about that!

thunderous

Listen!

Go to sleep.

No, it’s a storm! It’s out of control, I’m sure it’s a tornado.

Go to sleep.

We have to go downstairs!

Mmm.

I’m going downstairs.

Mmm.

The lights flicker, the wind is powerful. The trees are bending – I can see it well, the lightening is nonstop, like flashlight photos, one after another. The farmhouse has trees on two sides, but the nearest are pines. Can’t worry about pines. Their limbs aren’t heavy enough to come through the roof, into the bed.

I go downstairs and huddle in the mudroom, flashlight and phone in hand. Essentials to survival. My laptop isn’t too far either. Life’s work on it. Can’t lose that.

And then it passes.


In the morning we survey the damage. Limbs down, yard cluttered with the post-storm debris. My landlord seems unfazed. Have to take the John Deere and the chainsaw out. Maybe later.





We have such different personalities.

It’s Saturday – market day, but it’s raining hard. We opt for the Westside Community market: compact and condensed. All the essentials are there.










Back at the farmhouse, Ed snoozes on the couch with Isis, I work.

the meal deal

Well, maybe it’s time for the schedule of work to click in. Summer’s great, but is it possible that we’ve become too relaxed about life?






Our eating habits are unraveling. There is still a phony regularity to the enterprise: we have breakfast together on the porch, but oftentimes, Ed’ll pass on breakfast eating. He'll munch on a blueberry and we'll idle through the next half hour watching butterflies. And lunch? It comes late. After we put in hours of work. We’ll go to the café, say at around 4, I'll bring my own sandwich. No one makes PB and J as well as I do.

But the really big issue is dinner.

It's evening. I get up to start dinner prep. Ed gets up to help himself to five portions of watermelon. I lose my desire to cook anything at all since within minutes he’ll say – I’m stuffed. What a surprise. And so I downgrade the effort. I do, for example, this:





True, they’re garden tomatoes and it’s market corn and the Trader Joe’s smoked salmon has omega this and thats, but still, it’s not what I call a solid dinner. It’s not warm, for one thing. That’s summertime for you – you throw things together from the fridge and pretend you have a meal.

Come next week, free time will be very very precious again. The weather will deteriorate, the butterflies will be gone. To Mexico maybe. Lackadaisical habits will disappear. And invariably, I’ll work harder at putting together more focused dinners. Which will be a good thing.

rosie in the morning

I toss in the usual morning way. Because I should be getting up soon, I am especially feeling comfortable in bed. As if staying there is the most wonderful thing, as if I could do this for hours, as if getting up belongs to another time, another place.

One eye open. I glance out the window. Ah, the mist rising last night has found a home for the morning. I can see wisps of it.

I should go out and take a photo.

You should.

I should.

Go out and get your photo. Go, you like doing that.
I should. Toss, burry into the bed. Sigh. Get up.

Maybe I should take Rosie out. There’s a lot more distance that can be covered in case the fields just next door aren’t at their morning best.

We head east on the road. Nice!





The farmhouse is maybe a mile or two from a lake. I tell Rosie – we’re going to the lake!




Oh, really, if I could paint, I would, right here, right now.





Slowly we head back, doing a small loop back to the farmhouse. And now the fields of corn are so golden, so perfectly Septemberish.





The sun has broken up the ribbons of foggy air. But a few strands remain. Rosie and I pause and watch. How can you not.





Back we go to the farm.

It’s going to be a warm day. I’ll get going soon enough, but first, a few more minutes in a morning sleep, replaying the images from the morning ride.

my face is my windshield (Wednesday, continued)

Eventually, the sun recedes to the very edges of the farmette...





...Ed goes off for his Wednesday ride, and I take Rosie downtown for a burger dinner on the square with my daughter.





That is always a splendid way to spend an evening. But what I hadn’t expected was the further treat that followed the meal – a ride after the sun had just set. By one lake, then another – ahhh, magnificent.







And such colors! A sky doused with the hottest chili pepper sauce!







As I steer Rosie away from the city, I notice the evening bugs – the ones you typically catch on your car windshield. They don’t go away just because you’re on a moped. My face catches one, then another and I think – my, you have piercing body parts! Because truly, evening bugs are sharp!

Still, what a night! Rosie and I take the back way, so that we can creep up on the farmhouse quietly, away from the main road. And we are rewarded by a beautiful vignette – with a gentle mist rising from the warmed fields, overseen by the smallest sliver of a moon.





Rosie and I slow down and I think -- this is a good way to exit August.

when the day is through

We’re sitting on the porch, our feet up and resting on the ledge. The canvas chairs permit us to sway a little. An iPod is crooning some mild jazz, but really, the noise of the crickets is far louder. It’s nearing five and the shadows have crawled over much of the flower patch and driveway. I say to Ed – it feels like early fall. He answers – it feels like summer. He and I look out differently. I notice the movement of sunlight. He notices the warmth in the air. I am looking for an interesting photo. He is thinking of his bike ride in an hour or so.

It completely makes sense to me that people who have been around some should love a porch so much. Say you’re a parent: you’ve pushed your kids plenty. You’re not worrying about feeding them oatmeal anymore. You have more free time. Work is done for the day, now what? Read some spirited debate on the Internet? Forget it! Controversy is for the babes out there. You’ve heard the debates, the arguments, the nonsense. You know that no one is ever fully right. So, feet up, eyes out toward the sky. Crickets and a receding streak of sunlight are so much more interesting. We listen and watch and occasionally comment on what we see before us and really, we could go on like this for hours.

fresh run

I watch students cross University Avenue. The 1-Ls, the first year law students. A big deal day for them. How many times in life do you get to plunge into something fresh and new like this? Though maybe it’s not all new. And maybe you never really start afresh. You bring along your life into the classroom and then, at the end of the day, or the semester, or law school years, you pick up the essentials of your life again.

Me, I was distracted by my newborn at home when I was a 1-L. I thought about the law when I was on campus and then only about her, my tiny one, when I was off campus. Still, I took my work at school seriously. It was the last time I would be doing school. I wanted to do school with care.

And as I met with my 1-Ls today, I thought – they all care too. Ah, to do well by all of them! That is the goal.






I’m in my office again. Looking out on a green lawn, ridiculously being sprinkled today on this partly rainy day.





Later, Rosie and I do errands. We’re in town, so we do town stuff: picking up a bus pass (a symbolic gesture – there is no bus that comes within a mile of where I now live), a few groceries. Oh oh. It’s getting wet out there. Rosie and I battle the raindrops, all the way to the Oasis, where finally we meet up with Rosie’s garage-mate.





A good day.

another day, another season

I come outside in mid afternoon and notice that the sunlight is almost completely off the dirt driveway. It’s not a summer sun anymore. And even as I look forward to the changing seasons at the farmhouse, I know I’ll miss this easy season – of bare feet and warm fresh tomatoes. Of an open window in the bathroom so that I can listen to birds as I run the shower. I’ll miss that.

Isis has taken to coming in in the morning and, after sniffing in his usual nose-into-everything fashion, to jumping up on the window sill in the sunroom.





He’ll sleep there for hours unless I disturb him with kitchen noises. (He prefers to watch me cook, even if the cooking is only perfunctory – like it is at breakfast time.)

My daughter spent the night at the farmhouse and she said the words I have come to expect from visitors here: I sleep so well at the farmhouse! What is it about the place?

I know the magic. It’s the quiet, the sunshine, the lemon rug and the linen curtains. It's the ice cream, freshly churned and the just picked tomatoes on the counter. Evocative of a country serenity and of stress free times. The kind we don’t know much anymore.





Later, in the evening, I zip over to listen to music of Ernan Lopez-Nussa, a superb Cuban jazz pianist. He’s playing in a trio at the home of friends. Here they are -- the trio and the pair of friends in the background:


 


It's a maiden night voyage for Rosie and me. On a scooter, you feel the cool air seep in when you pass through the lowlands.

I had, earlier, put in another solid morning of writing, under-the-gun writing – I have so little time left!

I feel satisfied. Despite the travel or maybe because the periods of travel this summer, I was able to double the text on my book. If I edit throughout the year and put in as many pages next summer, I shall be done by the end of 2012. Maybe on December 12, 2012, just to give it a little symmetry. It will be a very satisfying day indeed. Even if it’ll be in the dead of winter.

apples

The last undemanding day of summer. I wrote furiously, as if there was to be no tomorrow. Five pages, delivered. A record for me.

In the evening, I put it down. I reached for the apples and pealed them, one after another. I rolled out the dough, cooked the crème patisserie and threw it all together.





It’s rare that I bake complicated pastries these days. It’s rare that I have last days of summer where words tumble like apples from a neglected apple tree.

rivalry

A bit of competition may be good for you, but when the competing entities are animal rather than human, it can get nasty. When a visiting dog leapt forcefully at a door behind which lurked a suddenly timid Isis, Ed decided that keeping the two animals apart for the remainder of the visit was a good idea.

That meant that Isis had to sleep in the farmhouse. You could nod your head and say – yep, I knew it, he’ll have you holding a "welcome, Isis" sign up at the farmhouse in no time. But, the circumstances were unusual. And it was only for one night, because Isis was feeling threatened, the poor thing.


Later, when it was time to head for coffee and, in conjunction, to the public library for our usual swap of viewing matter, Isis was again content, without hound nor stranger to scare the daylights out of him.

Unfortunately, at the library, we ran into a friend of Ed’s. Said friend of Ed’s happens to be taking care of a stray cat. And the question arose – might we want to help by caring for this homeless beast? She is as cute as a button, which is a good thing, as they’ve been calling her "Button." So should we spring a surprise on Isis and add a Button to the farmette? And will that mean that the farmhouse will suddenly have not one, but two cats constantly begging to be let in for movie time in the evenings? I haven't an answer just yet, in the same way that I don't know whether one day, we'll have chickens here.

The nasturtium looked especially stunning today. Vibrant. Almost red in their profound orangeness.





In other news, I think there is mild competition of another sort. My bike does not like all the accolades I throw Rosie’s way. When I pedaled to the downtown market this morning, I could sense a pouting resistance. As in – why does the moped get to have a special name and so much attention? To which I would respond (if the bike could really converse) – I gave you a name too, didn’t I? Wasn’t it something like Mr. G? Which I would then have to admit -- isn’t very attractive. So let me hereby change it to Mister Red which sort of sounds like Mister Ed which confers a nod to the person who influenced me toward more serious biking in the first place.

In days that I forget, I can call it “the bike,” because that’s what it is. As in -- today I took "the bike" to the market.










Still another note for Ocean: the farmette harvest includes, this year, apples. Lots of apples from one prolific apple tree. They aren’t the type to die for and they have an exceptionally short shelf life, but they are tasty enough and though we’ve ignored them, being somewhat overwhelmed by tomatoes and peaches, this afternoon I agreed to take stock of the orchard's shower of apples.










Tomorrow I’ll crank up the oven. Apple pastries by dinnertime. That's the goal.


Finally, let me note that this was the last August farmers market day and so you could say that it was the last summer market day. Given that I have orientation sessions with my students this coming week, I have to say that for me, summer ends now.

Am I ready to end the longest vacation of my adult life? Well now, work time can rarely compete successfully with free time. But, we'll see how it all plays out in the  days ahead.

protecting the turf of the little guy

Rosie’s red lips kissed the dust good bye and away she and I flew on an errand morning.

She rewarded me with a clever maneuver when someone pulled out from a side street and did not spot me, or her. How could you not see Rosie? She is so stunningly beautiful! And spicy bright red. Jeez, get off the cell phones already, people! Look out for the small fry on the road!

We flew home together unscathed, moods swinging high, passing hills and vales and struggling cyclists.

Home, finally. Or almost home. Slowed down to wave at the farmer across the road and in seeing us, the farmer perked up and ambled over to her wheelbarrow...





...where she reached for the finest flowers and handed them to us, out of the generosity of her heart. (Or a secret love for Rosie.)





Later, I fired up the grill. Ed’s friend is in town and that is occasion enough to grill brats (of the chicken and hot pepper variety) and corn and to make blueberry frozen yogurt.









Because Ed’s friend came with his dog, Isis jumped high into the rafters of the garage and stayed there until I coaxed him down. Last I heard, the dog wanted to play chase. Isis would have none of it. Smart animal. One should always avoid being chased by those who are significantly larger and more powerful than us.

cant get soft down at the farm

Ever since rosie came into my life, I’ve given up doing long hauls on the bike. Oh sure, we bike to the Oasis, but that’s 3.5 miles away. Rosie is so much fun that if I need to go further, I take her, rather than the bike, for a spin.

That’s not good.

Country living is supposed to toughen the body and soul. And so I made today a 100% no matter what bike day. And it was no stay at home and write kind of a day either. I had an appointment on Madison’s west side, I had meetings with students on campus and then another appointment on what is no longer even Madison on the west side.

Forty-four bike miles for the day.

And sure, the weather is on my side.





And the mock sunflowers are having their shining moment. As are the black-eyed girls.





And the Madison streets aren’t crowded and I get to revisit past favorite spots, like Owen Woods...





...and the ever beautiful, meditative lake shore bike path.





...and see the band do its practice – something I no longer see on a regular basis, ever since I moved south to the farmette.





So it is a good day.



(the last mile, photo by Ed)


Now, can I have my Rosie back tomorrow and the next day?

preserving summer

Could it get more homey than this? I tell Ed I’ll address the peach problem today. The thing is, we have a peach tree and it bends so much that you cannot walk the path to Ed’s sheepshed. The branches stand in the way. They're loaded with ripening peaches. Curious fruits, these peaches are. Small. The size of apricots.





And you have to pick them at the perfect moment. Too early and they’re hard. Too late and they’re cottony and dry. And chewed over by beetles. But when you hit their fine hour, you have yourself a lovely batch of peaches.





So I pick the ripe ones and peel and pit them and put them on a tray for freezing purposes. And so the freezer bounty grows. Raspberries, rhubarb, tomatoes, peaches. All from the garden.





Remind me to use them come winter. I tend to forget.


In the evening, my daughter comes...





...my daughter goes. Ed bikes with Wednesday Night bike riders. The night light sets in. I’m so glad I’m done with peach preservation.We can move on to Fall. Reluctant, but ready.