Poland, now

We are in a cab, crawling through rush hour traffic toward Warsaw Central train station and I notice it – Palac Kultury. The landmark building. Stalin’s 1952 gift. I run through the usual quick spiel on it – the awe-inspiring height (32 stories, but tall stories -- it's the 8th tallest building in all of Europe), the parades that took place on May 1st in front of it, and as I’m rattling this off, I take out my camera, because this is such a symbolic building in Warsaw that it deserves photographic commemoration each first time I come face to face with it during my returns to Poland.





But if I could have seen the eyes of our young taxi driver, I would have probably spotted an eye-roll. He was born just before the great change toward a market economy took place in Poland and his young adult years have been in the Poland of today – the one which feels to him (and to so many others here) very western. No different than, say, America.

He says as much. Why do Americans make us stand in line and pay big money for a visa to visit their country? He demands to know. It’s, for me, the perennial question. I’m asked this each and every time I come to Poland and I have no answer for it.

It’s a communistic style of thinking, he continues (in Polish). Like we still want to grab something from America. Well, we have America here right now! If I go to America, it’s to see it. To find out if it’s like in the movies. Not to grab! We were such fans of your country, but you’re losing us on this one.

Yes, I know.

I also understand that he does not like it when foreigners think of Poland as the “former communist country.” It’s not that to him and I can tell that he dislikes my references to that communist past.


Contrast this with the conversation we have in the compartment of a train that’s speeding... well, no, not really speeding, more like stalling... from Warsaw to Krakow. With us is a young Polish banker, traveling for a week-end in Krakow. He speak in accented but perfect English. As does his wife, who is, at the moment, reading an Alice Munro book.

What an embarrassment, he says as the train comes to another halt and an announcement is made of a fifteen, maybe twenty minute delay. (He does not know that I am, in fact, Polish. Or from Poland.) Our trains are awful. Outdated. The whole infrastructure is completely inadequate. They’re building roads quickly now, because of next year’s World Soccer Tournament, here, in Poland, but still, it’s a disaster if you compare it to roads and rails in western Europe.

He’s impatient with the Poland of today. He’s got a child who is almost ten. Ah, but you can't have it all, not all at once, I want to say. Look at you! You're so well dressed! Especially as compared with me, slouching in the corner in my baggy sweater and ever faithful curds.

I don’t know why we are having these delays, he continues. It’s not as if the weather is terrible, like last year’s snows. (Oh, do I know about last year’s snows!)
Ernest comments – we’re from Minnesota. We understand snow.
Our banker friend asks -- How is it there when the snows come? How does it affect your public transportation?
We have no public transportation, I blurt out.
No, I mean, the network of public trains or buses that you use to get from one town to another. He thinks he’s not explaining himself well.
We don't have a network of trains or buses that connect towns and villages.  
Well, in Minneapolis, there is the light rail now. Ernest comes to at least the city’s defense. Home pride.

It’s limited. To Minneapolis.

We are a car society, Ernest admits. It's interesting that this fact still shocks people here.

The announcement is made that the train is making up its initial delays. Indeed, each time the train stops the conductor announces that we are catching up for a timely arrival.
Our young banker smiles. This is new, this attention to customer satisfaction. You see more and more of it: well dressed, friendly conductors. Trying to please. Very new.


And so we are in Poland. And what an easy journey it was! Tail wind, announces the captain of the flight from Madison to Detroit. We’ll be in early. Tail wind, announces the captain on the flight from Detroit to Paris. We’ll be in a good twenty minutes early. Tail wind, announces the captain on the flight from Paris to Warsaw (I kid you not). We’ll be in early.  And we do arrive early. Ernest is there waiting.





I have to grin at the comparison with last December’s trip to Poland: snowed in and delayed, often for days, at every single leg of the journey. Not now, not this year. The skies are gray, the air is damp from recent rains. You could see it flying in.





...but it’s not wintery yet.

Even as it can seem cold, especially at the Central train station in Warsaw, where it always feels cold.


 


I look around. The waiting hall has been cleaned up some, but there isn't a place to sit and besides, it really is miserably chilly. I envy the scouts that I see sprawled on the floor by the stairs – not for the camping they’ll surely be doing, but for the temperature indifference that young people have, that I once had.






We arrive in Krakow.

Sometime on the train, the tiredness of the incredibly long journey overwhelms my friends. Me, on the other hand,  I want so badly to get there already, so that I can walk, and walk some more and take it all in.

We check into the lovely little Hotel Unicus and make plans to meet in the morning. They retire, I head out.






And I take in this beautiful magical city...


 


...on a full moon night.






The Christmas Market is going strong... it’s homey and less formal than what you’d see in German cities. I eat a grilled smoked ewe's milk cheese with cranberries...






... and I pause to eat a supper of cabbage and potatoes, accompanied with hot mulled wine.






The smoky air is pungent and the potatoes have the fragrance of grilled kielbasa.


 


The woman behind the counter at the grill stand asks me if it’s getting cold.  
No, I tell her, not really. Above freezing at the moment.  
There’s snow where I come from, she answers. 

And where do you come from? 

The mountains. A small village called Istebna.

Is it pretty?

Yes!

I’ll have to see it soon.

And you know, someday I’m sure to do that. A random tip from a cabbage and sausage vendor. Sounds good to me.

taking off

What a surprise: the work got done (though not until early this morning), the small carryon got packed (later this morning), the house is tidy and waiting (okay, it's always tidy)...

...for my return some ten days from now. Ed’s staying home – he and I will travel together after Christmas. For the trip to Poland, I’m traveling with my good friend (and fellow blogger!) Diane and her husband Ernest – or at least part of the travel will be together as we’re all flying from different points and through various connecting cities.

Good-bye bare fields of early December – you looked sublime this morning as the sun was crawling up behind clouds at dawn.





Good-bye huge sky of the Midwest...





Good-bye almost completely yellow farmhouse with the holiday lights hung carelessly over the doorway.





Tomorrow’s post should be from Poland.

returning home

If you move far away from your childhood town or city, if it’s in a flyover state, or an other side of the ocean location, how often would you go back? And with what sweet memories of warm, coddled moments of childhood?

My earliest memories of Warsaw are so fine and beautiful, but they start to change rapidly as layers of childhood are replaced with layers of adolescence and then layers of adulthood. There, the fabric gets messy. Gold threads are interspersed with something sadder, unraveling in places.

Once I had kids (in the States), I had a long period of time when I did not go back to Poland. And then I did go back. Again and again. And I haven’t been sorry, even as each trip is a tad complicated and leaves me thinking afterwards that I need a vacation.



Last day of classes. Oh, it’s the usual, only more of it. Forget about Rosie, forget about biking, I zip in my Red Hot Lover and am grateful for the few minutes I have in it. Warm, calm, with the good sound of classical music.

I try to remember what I must do before leaving tomorrow. Gift shopping, yes, done that. Laundry. Yes, that too. Recharge camera batteries, yawn, I’m boring myself from the tedium of such a list.

I’m still not finished with exam writing – I’m giving myself until midnight tonight!

But I do take a break in the morning. I need to call a phone number that’s just been emailed to me. I need to call a woman who lives in a mountain valley in southern Poland, so isolated that you need to hike for an hour from the nearest paved road to get there. And yet, she now has a phone line and I can call.

She speaks a dialect that you don’t hear much anymore in the Polish highlands. At 85, she is of a generation of highlanders that I know from my youth.

She picks up the phone as if she had been doing it all her life. Yes, yes, sure I remember you (to be fair, she was called earlier by a Polish friend warning her that she may hear from me)! Yes, yes, do come, God willing, the roads will stay clear. Come, leave your car by the priest’s house before you hike out. It’ll be fine there!
Will you be home this Sunday? Or will you be going to the village to church? When I last saw her five years ago, she was still making the weekly hike up to the hill crest then down again.
My great nephew will take me in the morning. (Some vehicles are able to maneuver the heavily rutted road to the hamlet where she lives.)

Well then, weather permitting, I will see you Sunday.

And I log off Skype, marveling at how easy it all is these days.


Alright. It’s time for me to go back and spend a few days in Poland. Even as for the holidays, I’ll be back here. Home.





Hi Isis. You want to come in for a while?

the last Tuesday of the semester

If you change countries several times in your youth, you get to know that days can get crazy and unpredictable and you also know that you can tally forth and stay strong. Crises don’t knock you down. (Not immediately anyway.) You find your house has been flooded two minutes before your class starts? You go in and teach and after, you call the insurance company. And maybe between lectures you fly down and mop up some of the basement. (No no -- no flooding... I'm talking hypotheticals.)

So I fall into that groove of coping today. Can’t sleep at night? Well fine. More time to edit exam questions! Cat comes in at 3 a.m., just when I finally doze off? So be it. At 4, the familiar “Nina, are you asleep?” I answer –“mouse?” He responds “yes,” and so now I really can’t sleep anymore at all. Not this night, perhaps not any night. The better to think through what gifts must be gotten and what clothes must be washed before I take off in a couple of days.

Morning. Off to work. Drive, then run.





One class, a second, a third. Students come to my office with lists of questions. (Wow, thirteen? Oh that’s only the first page! Okay...)

Evening darkness. I drive to the café. The plan is for me to work on my stuff there until closing and beyond, but Ed is not quite functional and the proprietor is not quite understanding of my need to get things done and so I push aside exams and focus on the world around me. 

Home. Finally home. Once there, Ed settles in to sleep some more (blame it on booster shots – I don’t think he’s ever had them before and they seem to have wiped him totally, completely), I throw a frozen dinner into the microwave.

I alternate between thinking – "this is crazy" and  "this is manageable."

Ed wakes, lets Isis in, I try to motivate myself to continue working, as somewhere in the background the soon to be returned 37 inch TV drones on, except when it’s silenced by Ed who can’t stand the commercial and therefore uses the mute button with abandon.

the season

Ah, holidays! This is the day of the Law School winter holiday party – by far the biggest workplace social event of the year.

I can’t go. I have too much work for this night.

Lunch speakers I can’t listen to (classes, never-ending classes interfere), conferences that pass me by, social events that are for anyone and everyone. So they say.

It’s been a very very work-packed semester.

Two more days. Two more days.

Walking away from school, away from the party, I face a somber world of cold drizzle. Eastern European weather. I expect it there, not so much here. Not day after day of this. Enough already.





In the evening, Ed volunteers to help. I am happy about this, but the reality is that I can’t split the tasks. And so I persevere, but with him at the side, at least looking sympathetically on, bringing a bubbly or some nuts when hunger or exasperation have me reach out for something to nibble or sip.

Monday is almost over. Tuesday will be the essence of impossibility, Wednesday will pick up the pieces of what could not be accomplished on Tuesday. That’s it. Not a penny more. Thursday I turn my back on all but the emails. There’ll be work – lots of it during what is officially called “winter break” but you wont hear me moaning about it. Everyone has period when they're saddled with work, after all. It’s just that most at least can attend a winter party. Not me. Not this year. It's been a brutal stretch of weeks.

Sunday at home

I should have worked hard long hours today. I had set a goal. I did not meet it. At the end of the semester, I haven’t the same concentration that I had earlier. I’m tired. Giving up weekends to work becomes hard.

And so when one daughter wakes up in the farmhouse lemon room and the other came over with a bag of fresh doughnuts, I think – that’s it, forget work. This morning is ours.





We linger over a mushroom and spinach frittata, then my girls and I head out to the Mega Target store. My Chicago girl needs to Christmas shop and we are so happy to tag along and give endless, bossy advice.

At Target, we run into Alice – the now retired secretary of my daughters’ elementary school. She is a heroic and oh so lovely person in my eyes and she now looks at my daughters with a grin ten miles wide – mainly because well, they’ve grown!


In the early afternoon, the younger girl is on the bus to Chicago and the older one is off in her own world of activity. I return to the farmhouse to clean and scrub. My last such effort before I take off later this week. Ed helps me. Isis picks a spot in the middle of the quilt that covers the big bed and sleeps the day away.

of mice, trees and men

Whenever Ed asks in the middle of the night – hey, are you asleep? – the answer is inevitably going to be “no.” A nudge is enough to startle me into wakefulness. When the question is followed (as it was last night) by – “...because I think we caught a mouse downstairs,” well then you can be sure that I’ll sit up, wide awake, listening for that familiar from last spring sound of a trap bouncing around on the floor with a mouse inside.

We both go down to inspect it. Who is this creature that eats tomatoes (instead of the pumpkin seeds lying casually to the side)? Ed shakes the trap over a big plastic bin, reconciling himself to the late night drive with it into the countryside. Two miles, I tell him, or it’ll come back!

Sigh, okay, but here, take a photo of it, it’s awfully cute. He lifts the lid gingerly and I half scold him (cover it, cover it, for Pete’s sake!), but I also inch closer to see.





And out she jumps past my peering nose, easily clearing the slippery six inch sides of the container.
Catch her! I shout, even as I know and Ed knows that that dang mouse is now as free as a bird on the crabapple tree.

Let’s set the trap up again, Ed says, smearing slabs of peanut butter at the end of the small plastic tunnel.
You think she’ll come back? I ask, with great doubt.

The day is drippy wet and I have to work most of the daylight hours.





But when evening comes, my younger daughter alights from the Chicago bus and eventually we make our way to my neighborhood bar for a quick beer. Did I mention that I have a neighborhood bar? Oh yes – two miles one way and I have the café. Two miles the other way and there is this:





We hadn't quite realized that it was the Badgers’ big game tonight and I for one felt out of place, sitting there in my green shirt (coincidence!) in a room full of red.

We didn’t watch the entire game because late, late, oh so late, we were to go to my older girl’s house to finally decorate (with the entire truckload of family ornaments) the tree. This tree.





Angels with trumpets, snowmen singing carols. What’s there not to love?

Home again now. Rain outside. Probably the last one this year. Probably. Put away the cans of paint, Ed. Winter’s coming tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, he mutters. But he takes them down to the basement.

December doings

Morning. I come down to fix breakfast, I reach across the counter to turn on the Nespresso and... well now, that’s interesting. I notice that on the plate next to it – the one where I keep fruits and tomatoes, one quarter of a Roma has been chomped off.

Do mice eat tomatoes?

Out comes the mousetrap, just in case. With peanut butter. I’m hoping that a tomato loving mouse hasn’t lost a natural lust for peanut butter.


Tomorrow, my daughters have scheduled a family tree trimming in the older one’s home. I’m happy about that. But a farmhouse without a tree seems too odd, too not me, too much a departure from the holidays and traditions that I’ve always followed.

I thought at first I’d get a scraggly left-over tree – the one no one wants, to put up just a day before Christmas. But that’s too short of a period of glory, especially because Ed and I are packed and out of here soon after the holidays.


The café is a good place to speculate out loud about such imponderables as tree or no tree. Last night Paul, the proprietor, suggested that I do what his family does – place one's faith (and ornaments) on a potted tree, grown indoors, each year bigger, just an inch or two, but there, never discarded, never robbed of its dignity.

I could argue about that: from the perspective of the tree, what’s better – years of life in the forest, followed by a spell of adornment and adoration inside someone’s home, or an indifferent life in a pot, hauled this way and that, but never quite admired as much, never eliciting the oohs and aahs, with cramped roots bursting to be released, just once to push against the heavy soil...

In driving downtown to grocery shop, I pass a nursery and the die is cast. A potted tree it will be. Bound roots and all. Welcome, tree. (Here it is several hours later. Standing proudly, not too far from the soon to be returned TV.)






On my trip downtown, I have some holiday moments. Gift getting.






Browsing. But not too long. Home, I needed to return home to the prettily yellow farmhouse...





... which looks especially dignified and lovely on a day when the sky is as blue as... the blue spruce?





My mind is on pine trees.


Ed has a gift coupon for Menards. When I tell him I am on the prowl for lights to make the little tree festive, he suggests a late drive there.
We spend a long time sifting through holiday lights.
How about these?

Fine.

No, let’s go with the LEDs

Fine.

On the other hand, LEDs are expensive.

Next to us, a woman and her son are loading box after box of lights into a shopping basket.
Don’t get door lights, the husband mumbles. They’re a mess.
Ignore him, the woman says.


At home, I find holiday music on the radio and I place the string of colored lights on the potted tree. I save a box of white ones for the doorway. Ed goes to the shed to find an extension chord. Five minutes later, we have a (potted) Christmas tree.

the week ahead

If it appears that my days are a stream of good, if sometimes dull moments, I’ll admit that your perceptions are more or less accurate. It is also true that when a busy day throws punches left and right, I falter. It helps to stay steady and calm. And I do try for that.

I don’t always succeed. Today, through bizarre and not readily explainable circumstances, I had a huge work issue fall in my lap – one that will take days, many many days to fix. (It was not of my doing, true enough, though in life that hardly matters – a crisis is a crisis and looking for fault gets you no closer to resolving the problem.)

So I could throw up my hands and hurl nasty words. But that wouldn’t keep the calm that I need to work through this.

All this will drown my next few days with added work. Making up for (someone’s) mistakes takes time.

On the upside – a week from today, I am hopping on a plane and heading out. Not with Ed, not this time, but with good friends from up north. And we’re heading – even further north. I dangle this for you and for myself. It is a light at the end of what promises to be a hugely tedious set of days.

Or maybe not hugely tedious. I mean, what's tedious about this: I wake up, thinking not immediately about the tasks for the day, but about how pretty this December day is. Even though the hose, loosely thrown on the wood-chip driveway should have been put away long ago. And so it's frozen through and through. Maybe later, if the sun comes out, we can attend to it...






Ah, but it’s a hazy, winter sun. Late in the afternoon, it plays with possible snow clouds. Or so we're told by the weather channels.






Sweet, lovely moments. Like the one when I went with a daughter to pick up some chocolate gingerbread cookies at a bakery to the north of us. And took in a whiff of these.






Or, much later, returning home, when I found Ed shoveling out a truckload of chips to build a winter compost mound.

The sun had long set by the time he and I drove to the café. And still, I couldn’t fully unwind then. Emails, damage control, work – all that interfered. But not for long. An hour or so later we were home again. I scrambled eggs and popped some bread into the toaster for supper. And for the rest of the evening, finally, nothing else mattered.

last day of November

Okay, surely this is the last time! I know student types bike through snow drifts, but today is plenty cold for me. Though sunny, too and so out comes Mr. Red.  Pedal on!






Though if you can’t see the ice forming on this inlet, it’s because my photo isn’t good enough to show it off.






Coming home is tougher.






A tired and hungry person should not be climbing hills that lead up to the farmette.






It can make one grumpy. As I park the bike (for the season?) in the garage shed, I pick up nearby clippers. I may as well cut back the rose bush that extends too far over the path to the door of the farmhouse. As I snap away, backpack tossed to the side, the prickly twigs grab my coat and hold on. I call out to Ed who is standing nearby -- Ed, could you help me please? 

That phrase “Ed, could you help me please” is dangerously prominent in my everyday. Ed, the shower handle is loose. Ed, why isn’t the outdoor thermometer working? In past years, I’d discard broken things that I couldn’t fix (that would be a good 75% of broken anything). Or I’d live with the deformity. Or hire someone. I realize how easy it is to say now -- Ed, the coat hook is loose, the twig has grabbed my coat, the water heater is off again, the Christmas tree stand is missing a screw (all these from the last week alone).

It would never have entered my mind to carefully allocate tasks between Ed and myself in these times that we've hung out together. It happened almost intuitively. And they're unbelievably gendered allocations. Ed, don’t wash that – you don’t use warm water or soap, just let me do it. Ed, I’ll be downtown today, let me pick up the groceries. Ed, can I get you a bubbly? (I have slipped into his quirky vocabulary here) a blanket? a clean shirt?

As Ed plucks bramble twigs from my coat, I relax. But not totally yet. This semester has been menacing with my sanity. It'll take me a while to let go of it all.

We drive to the café where I have a shot of coffee and Ed dozes.

city lights

One aspect of this day was predictable: Tuesday. Many classes to teach. Early wake up, early everything, followed by a late return. Nothing new there.

On the return end, I paused. City time. A haircut (it’s been seven months since I had one! Jason, my former haircut man, would cringe). A glass of wine...





...dinner with a friend.

An urban dweller’s everyday. A dazzling step out of the ordinary for me.

Afterwards, I drove home to the country, where Ed never even noticed the haircut, but my sweats and red plaid flannel shirt and Isis were waiting. The lovely predictability of home.

the Monday after

The Honey Wagon came to the farmhouse today. $500 later, my landlord sent him on his way.

That’s a lot of honey, no?

Don’t be misled. The “Honey Wagon” is merely a name for a company that comes to clear, inspect, possibly fix your septic tank. By the price of things you’ll know that our problem was thankfully small. Another blocked pipe – the one leading out to the drain field.

Right now we have the cleanest septic tank this side of the Mississippi. So much so that I almost don’t want to, well, pollute it.

In fact, I am delighted that there was a quick and ready solution. Ed and I talked about possible scenarios should it become necessary to reconstruct the entire farmette septic system. I spoke in favor of extended-stay motels. He mused about roughing it. I am delighted that we did not have to flip a coin on those two choices.


It was, otherwise, a long day. I’ll have a week of long days, as I want so much to be able to take a break starting late next week. Work madness followed by weeks of near-calm. It's a pattern for me. I've gotten to almost like it.

In the meantime, you’ll be amused to know that Ed is packing up our beautiful, wonderful, addictive big screen TV. He found a better deal on this Cyber Monday. I know he’s hoping, too, for a set with a better tuner. Right now, antenna notwithstanding, every time someone walks in front of it, the picture freezes for a second. Ed tells me, not incorrectly – we’ll have this set for twenty years. How long before you, too, get irritated by it? So, the saga of the set continues.

But as I return to the farmhouse late, to that faint golden glow of the outdoor lamp, a half cloaked moon, an almost dark sky, I think these days are, well, quite heavenly.

slow to post today?

Tired, discouraged, overworked. But wait, doesn’t that describe any number of Fall Semester days? What’s different about this day? The gray skies? Eh, that’s November for you. So what is it that made it so top heavy, so monstrously difficult to navigate?

Blame it on the cat.

Please do note that he is “the cat” when I am ready to claw him to pieces. He is Isis at all other times.

The cat has things well sorted in his little head. Saunter over in the evening. Watch a little TV, saunter out, then in, then out then, just as the farmhouse inhabitants are getting heavy eyed – in again.

We go upstairs, the cat goes upstairs. He crawls all over. Ed tries to keep him to one unobtrusive spot on the bed. Ed fails. One hour, two, the cat jumps down and makes noises, weird noises, I want you to come down with me noises. Ed goes down, lets him out. Ed comes back up, the sensor/doorbell chimes. It’s the cat again, reconsidering.

We repeat this little game for the better part of the night. By 5 or 6, the cat settles down. At my feet. Meaning I cannot move my feet lest I knock the cat down. Mustn’t disturb his delicate nature. I stay still.

By 8, the cat wants to go out one last time and he stays out then and I fall into deep slumber. Finally. But only for a brief hour. Because even though it’s Sunday, I’ve got work to do and cat or no cat, I must attend to it.

But I am tired.

If I had wanted a robust outdoorsy Sunday, it was not to be. I walked the farmette property. I admired the steely blue fields to our north...





I absolutely loved seeing the Caribbean sunshine yellow of the farmhouse against the otherwise un-Caribbean colors of late November (even as I had to shake my head at the willow branches -- innocent and bare now, deceptively delicate, but I know better -- ready to attack any pipe that comes within spittin' distance of its stubborn root system).





Then I returned inside and worked some more.

...on a pear tree

For several weeks now, I’ve been saying this to Ed – it’s is last warm day... you should paint, you wont be able to do it again until spring!

But today, I think I'm right.

There isn’t a lot left – the wall behind the screen porch (who can even tell from the outside...), the dormer to the west. And I don’t really mind anymore. The house looks good and yellow, or yellow and therefore good. I’m happy. And still, Ed picks up the brush and sits down in the dry porch area to paint.

Even as today, I really say these words (it’s the last warm day...) more to myself than to him. To prod me into realization. We’re dropping down in temperatures significantly next week.

So, rather than bemoan the drizzly soppiness of the day, let me remember it for its unique warm loveliness. Especially as witnessed against a now Caribbean Sunshine Yellow house.





The weekend is a quiet one. Before the storm of December shenanigans. Isis comes and goes, I write exams, watch movies with Ed... We’re waiting until businesses open on Monday to attack the sewage issues. No real pressures today or tomorrow.

Though you have to look hard to find the pretty details, the things of color, the odd piece of fruit still clinging to the pear tree. No partridge. Just a pear -- oddly shaped, tough, but golden.






Turkey soup for dinner. With lime and avocado and chilies.  There is no better leftover food, eaten on quiet leftover days.

Thanksgiving reconsidered

By now, of course, it’s all a crazy and yet wonderful blur. Late Wednesday, four men working in the basement to unplug a pipe leading to the septic tank. Roots, coming out in bundles, like black fishermen’s nets tangled with seaweed. Laborious task. Reinforcements called in. Smells of baking pumpkin cheesecake should be filling the air. Instead, in the basement at least, there is faint odor of sewage.

The 100 feet of pipe is unplugged. They’ve paced it out, they know the length of it, the snake that pushes through appears to have made it all the way to the tank.

So why is the water backing up still?

The men pack up their machines and head out. You have a major problem – the lead guy tells us. Backed up tank maybe. Or worse, your drainage field’s not working. Dig out the manhole tomorrow. See where the sewage level’s at.


Thanksgiving morning. The golden grain was gathered all, the maize the nuts and the fruits of fall... a childhood song that I remember.

Ed has been digging since sunrise, uncovering the manhole to the tank. Looks awfully full in there. Still, for the time being we appear to be (cross your fingers here) okay. The system, however troubled, allows for some water usage. There’s a failure somewhere and quite likely we’re a hair’s breadth away from having to replace the entire sewage system at the farmette, but right now the water has resumed draining. To a dangerously high tank, but still, it’s draining.

Ed gives the thumbs up, for today at least. Proceed as usual. We’ll attend to the problem tomorrow. Okay, fine, but how do I make up for the lost yesterday?

I’m on track with breakfast. Sometime in the night I made the cinnamon rolls. Yeasty, spicy, rising now, ready to bake. Easy. They come out hot just as daughters, one boyfriend (other one has left to be with his clan) and Ed come together for the morning meal.





Lunch is easy, too. Traditional favorites. Squash soup with goat cheese herbed dumplings and chive scones. Daughter helps, food’s ready in good time.















But as my girl and I clear the table and attack the dinner menu, I realize that not baking the dessert earlier is going to be a problem. The pumpkin swirl cheesecake is ridiculously complicated. I hadn’t bothered reading through the recipe. Bake your own fresh ginger cookies for the crust? You’ve got to be kidding.


 


After, bake the crumbled cookie crust for a half hour, then, finally, bake the whole cake in a water bath, steaming it in a slow oven for two hours. Really? And when does the turkey get its turn? And the sweet potato rounds? And the cranberry muffins?


As the cookies bake, my younger girl and I take a break. She lives in the city. My mothering ways tell me she needs fresh air. Can’t do anything with the oven in use anyway. We walk across the fields...





Down to where the deer play. You can’t see them through my camera lens, but they’re there, distantly, specs of graceful movement.


It’s late. At the farmhouse we move into high gear. Both daughters and boyfriend are in the kitchen now, cooking chopping, moving from one dish to the next. The cheesecake is out. As I stuff the last herbs under the skin of the bird, we plunge the muffins in for a quick bake. Finally, at 5:35, I put in the turkey.

Meanwhile, we munch on appetizers – the sweet potato, the fried sage. Cheeses, artichoke bits, smoked salmon...










...and we take a break for a movie. And then my little one and I race to the finish line. Turkey’s out, mushrooms are browning in butter, brussel sprouts are pan roasting. Potatoes are tender, ready for mashing, cranberries are ready, corn needs a swirl with the chipotles.






We sit down to dinner just before 9. Within the acceptable time frame of this holiday, no?





Oh, yes, the pumpkin swirl cheesecake with the ginger cookie crust. That too.






Today, we recover. Ed and I weigh the probability of bypassing a major retrenching of the sewage system. Not even a small chance. We check levels, measure distances, look at the original plans of pipes and tanks made up for the previous farmhouse owners. Looks like the next weeks will focus Ed’s attention on this major project. For today, he finishes painting the outside farmhouse trim. How fortuitous that the painting project is nearing completion (except for one dormer – saved for spring now, for sure)!

In the late afternoon, Ed drives a captured mouse from the sheepshed. Isis is getting mouse lazy. Spending too much time moving from lap to lap, watching movies with us at the farmhouse.

Country living offers up interesting surprises.