Saturday

You know what I love about Saturdays?

No...

...It’s the only day where I don’t have to do anything. No classes the next day. No essential chores. No schedule! No rush!

So there’s another Ice Age Trail maintenance project today...

When?

9.

Ah well... so we rush. But you know, rushing for something that is as delightfully energizing and (therefore) pleasurable as heaving logs and branches on a bright February morning (the kind I dared only dream of yesterday) is an entirely different proposition.

But, despite the hurry, we are late for the meet up. (Taking the wrong road doesn’t help.) Where are they? We listen for the noise of a chainsaw. Silence.







We look for signs of fires burning. Nothing.






We hike the trail, hoping to come to come across the work crew.







And we find them. With a handful of teens who are here to do their community service.

It’s warmer today and within minutes, our jackets are off.











We work steadily, quietly, interrupting each other only to comment on the clumsiness of the other. Careful don’t trip. Don’t you trip. You’re so clumsy! Clumsy? You’re the epitome of clumsiness! And so on.

Toward noon, the Trail people get out the food for the volunteers. It’s our sign to take off. But this time I linger for just a little while. There’s great pleasure in watching these kids let loose over a very hot fire.

One of the Trail builders has brought his usual pots and pans and he teaches one kid to make chocolate cake under burning embers.






You get the feeling that life is good, here, in the clearing. Forget about the issues that push us to do stupid or angry things. Here – it’s all calm. The only noise is of snapping branches in the fire and of the chain saw around the bend.


Eventually I pull myself away and we drive the country roads toward home.






In other news: I thought about family this afternoon. I had reason to. Maybe the most poignant was a call to my father (in Warsaw). He was looking for reassurance on some family matters and I gave it to him, even as I believe none of it. He’s old. He deserves not to worry.

But, additionally, he asked me to call a friend of ours in New York. It is that friend’s birthday and my dad no longer has the ability to work through the complexity of calling someone far away and communicate effectively with the odd person who picks up the phone.

I was reluctant. Dad, I don’t have any contact with those people anymore.
Please, call.
Sigh. Okay.

They’re famous. They are the ones whose daughter I cared for when I came back to this country as a young adult. I don’t like keeping in touch with famous people.

But, it was my dad’s request and so I called. Family. The person whose birthday it is could not talk, but his family was there and they did and we reminisced some – about the years when they were my life, my home, my reason for being in the States.

Families are there for each other – I’ve heard that line so often. Sometimes they are. When I come across instances when that is the case, it makes me smile.

flip flop

In my early years here, in Wisconsin, I often got the question – oh, you’re from Poland... is it as cold there as it is here?

Colder, I’d say.

Really? What’s the winter low?

Oh, not as low as here...

But you said...

It just feels colder. Damp, prickly cold, the kind of cold that makes your bones shiver.

I rarely feel that kind of cold in Madison. But I felt it today.

It seems that we’ve traded places: Madison was like Bialystok (a Polish city worst hit by a vicious cold front passing through Eastern Europe) and Bialystok was like Madison.


Early today, there were the fog alerts. Dense, soupy – words that make you think of towels soaked in cold pea porridge. But by the time I set out for campus, the alerts are over and done with. What remains is the gray.

Lake Mendota never looked less... approachable.





No matter. It’s February. And the weekend. And I have chicken soup on the stove and the idea that we’ll be chopping down some invasives in the back of the farmette once the weather improves and in case all this soupy wetness is the way it’s going to be until April – well, that’s a good excuse to get away. And I will.

But not just yet. February is, this year, a stick it out at home month for me. I like home. Bathed in sunshine home. No, not true. Just home.

at the end of the day

Nearing the end of a full week. Finally. Meet Ed at Paul’s. Paul has a helper in today.
So, she asks, you guys went away somewhere?

Yes, Spai...

New Jersey! Ed pipes in.
New Jersey?

He’s just saying that. It was Sp...

We went to New Jersey.
Where, Newark? I hear it’s up and coming.

No, no, not that...

Huh?

There are times when Ed is so uncontrollably boyish! His age, divided by six.

When you have a long week, you under-appreciate boyishness in another. Especially when (for the third time this week) your Apple computer is malfunctioning and there’s no food at home for dinner and the snow is melting before your eyes.

Snow melting... It was not like that this morning. It rained fog -- a misty white dusting of freezing particles.













By afternoon it is all gray and gone and there we are, at Paul’s, bantering about New Jersey.

once upon a time

I liked poetry. I went through a phase. Not too long ago. Clare Cavanagh, a frequent translator of the Polish writer, Wislawa Szymborska, came once to speak at Borders and I was, at the time, enthralled.

A poem for you today, by Szymborska (this one is translated by Joanna Trzeciak):

Some like poetry

Some--
that means not all.
Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting the schools, where one must,
and the poets themselves, there will be perhaps two in a thousand.
Like--
but one also likes chicken noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue, one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one's point,
one likes to pet a dog.
Poetry--
but what sort of thing is poetry?
More than one shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and clutch on to it,
as to a saving bannister.


As I read today about the death of Szymborska (in Krakow, where she lived virtually her entire long life) I spin back to the time when poems (of others) were scattered across my table and if asked, I would have told you that they would be part of my life forever.

They weren’t. These days, I prefer essays.

In that same period of time (the time of poetry), I was being a mom to two young girls. Each had her own set of fleeting passions, but today I remember the one belonging to my older girl. At the age of twelve, maybe thirteen, she developed a love of musicals and especially as belted by the unstoppable Patti LuPone.

Patti was with us on long car trips – on tapes played on the boring highways between Madison and Pittsburgh (where the paternal grandparents once lived) and she was with us at home, played loudly, or maybe it’s just that Patti always sang so loudly!

Fifteen, or was it seventeen years ago, my older girl learned that, after a bit of a hiatus, Patti LuPone would be again appearing in public, singing through her beloved Broadway repertoire in a theater in New York. It was not our habit to take weekend trips those days. Funds were tight, college was looming. But, I badly wanted this one:  a mother daughter week-end in New York. Since then, I have traveled frequently with my younger girl, but that New York weekend remains the only trip that I ever took alone with my older daughter.

It was a fantastic set of days! At the end of the performance, we stood and watched as the show’s entourage left through the theater back door. Patti was there, real, alive, Patti LuPone – my daughter and I, the oddest demographic in the theater, to be sure, watching as fans like to watch. Satisfied, satiated.


Patti LuPone is in Madison tonight. My older girl and I meet for dinner downtown…





…and then proceed to the theater.







When you are a star, a diva, a performing musician, when you write award winning poetry, or more humbly, an obscure little blog called Ocean, oftentimes you don’t know who your audience is. Or if maybe someone is reading, listening, someone who is living a flight of momentary fancy, only then to disappear, until maybe fifteen years down the road, something happens and a memory comes back and he (or she) is with you again. Hey, I remember when I once read your poems and they made me smile, ever so broadly.


Patti LuPone sang well -- that's a given. But, time reshuffles cards for us, so that what is today is just a shade different than what was once upon a time. After the show, my girl and I went to the backstage door. For old time's sake. A small crowd -- maybe a dozen or two dozen people -- hovered, waiting for the grande dame to step out into her limo.We were told to form a line, to put away cameras. Patti came, scribbled a half formed letter (L? P? something altogether different?)  on people's outstretched programs and left.


Wieslawa Szymborska shied away from big crowds. She once said that any more than a dozen in one room made her uneasy.

I think how when you aim for big audiences and you get them, it changes you.

I hope that I never aim for big audiences. I hope that I remain shy with crowds of more than twelve.

a reversal of fortune

I learned a lesson today. Several, in fact, but one stands out: January 31st is, in the final run, January 31st. You can’t leap out of bed and think: spring! – even if outside it’s 35 degrees (that’s a Wisconsin spring morning reading) and there’s talk of record breaking highs in the afternoon (a sweltering 49).

Still, following a grueling Monday, I’m thinking how exhilarating it would be to bike to work! I haven’t biked since the end of November and hadn’t expected to until April. But 49!

My ever helpful shaggy haired landlord kindly steps outside (in a state of at least partial undress... it makes me smile to see him so oblivious to...the ways of the world) and brings out my bike for air pumping and light battery checking. By 8:30, I am on the road!

The best ride for me makes heavy use of the bike path. But it’s not the fastest route to campus. I’m nervous about the time -- my first class is at 9:30. I opt for a faster (45 minute) route. Combination bike path and road.

What’s this? Patches of snow? A little bit of ice maybe? A surface of frozen mist?






Well now. A challenge.

Okay, getting close to campus. Familiar vistas!







And here’s where I should have understood that where there is snow and where there is warm air, eventually, very eventually, there will be puddles. And sand, and salt, and all of this will make its way up, up and in a sweeping arch, hit me right on the back, my head, too, covering me with all the debris we throw on the roads to keep them ice-free.






Not that I immediately realize what is happening. I’m pedaling madly to get to school on time. Oh, I notice some specks of mud on my pants, but I shrug it off. A bit of mud? Eh --the price of any bike ride.






Minutes before class, I walk into my office, take off my jacket and see the damage. I take off the helmet. Salt in my hair. Indeed, mud, salt and sand everywhere.

So I learned something. And I suffer the indignity of teaching with a wet pants seat and salty pony tail. (The mud-splatterd jacket I can, thankfully, leave behind.)




Work day's done. The ride back is much nicer. Even as I just cannot believe that there are ice fishers on the lake. As if suspended on water.






Onwards. Past Lake Monona, which looks as if it's heading into April.





Done. Finally, splatterdly done. A stop at Paul’s (where are you Ed??? Late? Do you understand what it means to panic at someone’s absence??) and then the last lap home. Just as the sun sets.





Home.

Mmmm, farmhouse home.

Monday

I step outside, consider biking to work, laugh off the idea and walk over to the red hot lover. It’s nice there, in that parking spot.







That’s the last time I can apply the word “nice” to the landscape around me this day. The rest? Well, here’s a reality for you: from morning, til 5:30 I never shut up. Between student meetings and class hours, I was engaged in the art of talk. By the time I dragged in to the farmhouse, I was so disinclined to speak that I had no ability to voice preference for anything, including dinner foods.

Frozen lasagna. Good enough. Now please. Shhh. I have nothing more to say about anything.

we'll take it!

A half an inch of fresh snow – light, fluffy, you know the kind: it doesn’t quite settle in, but instead, hovers loosely, prettily over whatever was there before. In this case, it covers a layer of ice along our dirt driveway and, more importantly, it covers (ever so lightly) ski trails in the area.

But it wont last. Put a handful of skiers on it and it will be back to the new normal this year: bare patches along our forest trails.

We should be out there before all others, I tell Ed. The side of me that wants to seize the moment before it shatters and disappears is especially prodding us out of the house early. The week ahead will have a warm spell. What little snow there is will surely disappear soon.

The sun plays with the few puffy clouds. One minute we're dazzled in light, the next -- we're a somber blue.






By 9 we’re in our local county park. I can’t say that it’s blissfully quiet. A helicopter is running electrical components in the nearby Yahara wetlands and in fact, part of the park is closed for safety reasons.






That’s okay. We have a good loop that takes us away from it all.


 








Back toward Lake Waubesa, where the ice fishermen hang out.






It’s cold and blustery outside and I’m thinking maybe it would have been better to eat the breakfast oatmeal before the ski run. But, the sun is out and the sky has that early morning tint to it and it puts us both in such pleasant moods that I forget about the work and the cleaning and the tedious stuff that’ll frame the rest of the day.

Nice work, Ed. Only, could it be that you’re slowing down? I shout back at him.
I’m having a contemplative moment. I don't rush things, like you.
Good job staying upright on the hills! I retort.
Good job not breaking your camera! He answers.






And so we continue in this way until our loop is done and our gear is thrown in the back of the car again, with the hope that there’ll be another chance to use it this season.


In other news: may I give a piece of market advice for The Great Investors out there? My bet is that Apple is puffed itself out to be way out there, even as it is not altogether way out there. It's merely a company that sells machines and it isn't magic, nor intuitive, nor easy, because machines aren't magic or intuitive or easy and if you want to ride the cloud of hyper-nonsense about Apple's capabilities to do everything perfectly, feel free, but I'm not going to be there with you.

I wont spend much space on explaining how both Ed and I spent the better part of the afternoon working on getting on iCloud and upgrading my OS on my current MacBrookPro. That's boring. But I will complain about how many things in this whole procedure were odd and in fact downright nervewrackingly convoluted. I don't blame Apple for that. Technology IS complicated. I just wish it would fess up and not pretend differently.



Otherwise: yes, there's an otherwise. Otherwise, it was such a beautiful day. Isis was at the farmhouse with us. He decided we're worth the trek up the lightly snow-covered path.

fire

How are my eyebrows? -- I ask Ed. Completely gone?
No, just a little singed.
Casualties of the morning. Also undone – a pair of outdoor gloves. They were old, but still...

But let me say right away – and perhaps this will surprise you – it was an excellent morning.

My idea this winter to ski daily faltered rather quickly: the trails around Madison don’t have enough snow to make it fun. The temperature heaving has given them a brittle, icy coating. With twigs and pebbles poking through. I talked of doing a trip up north, but the older Ed gets, the less he likes spontaneous ling distance  journeys. And so this morning, as I see again a nice strip of bright light at the horizon just before sunrise, I say to Ed merely this – outdoors... we have to get outdoors today.

It’s windy and in the low twenties. Eh, so what. The Ice Age Trail folks (such apt description) are organizing a work day out on one of the segments of the trail just west of Madison.


 


At 9 a.m., we’re there with them at the trailhead, waiting for instructions.

Clear the hill, burn the brush.

It’s great work! Within minutes the cold ceases to be a problem.






And as the stacks of chopped and snipped wood grow, the fires flair and the air takes on a gusty smell of campfires.










Managing the fires when the wind is this strong is a challenge. My brows are the price to pay for it.


 


But it’s terrific work and for three hours, we chop, snip and haul until the leaders call for a lunch break. We leave then. We’re known for that – we come, we work, we leave. Unfriendly types who scorn bonding over dead flesh between slabs of bread. I wont deny it -- it's an apt characterization.

Ed drives the now fixed, but so very rusted Geo home. These hills west of Madison are especially pretty now, in January. Here, you can't tell that the snow cover is actually quite thin.





It is a beautiful landscape.






And now we’re at Paul’s café. Ed’s sleeping, I’m thinking about how to trim eyebrows around the missing parts. The smell of wood is still with us. The chill of the wind is long gone.

morning light

It’s late now. We’re watching a show on snakes. It’s fair to say that I dislike it immensely.  Sometimes I am fascinated in simply watching Ed become engrossed in a story. It makes up for the unusually gross nature of the subject matter. But this is not one of those times. I’m just a tad wiped from the day and though I can think of any number of better alternatives to tracking snakes – with all their disgusting hunting/eating habits -- I'm too tired to push for any of them.


It was, in fact, a delightfully (partly) sunny day. When the sun first peeked through, I was up and ready for it.






Ed was up as well, making repairs to his unbelievable tattered 93 Geo.






And Isis was up. He’d made his way up to the farmhouse this morning. Very early. In search of TLC.

Lovely blushed with sunshine minutes!






But that's it for the outdoors. We - all three of us - retreat and resume the indoor life. Isis by choice, Ed and I -- because it's Friday and that's just the way it is.







  
In the evening, I play to the memories of a gentler set of weeks. Somewhere in the background k.d. lang and Tony Bennett are crooning.  
Here, Ed, I’ve made shrimp salad for supper. Andalucian style.





To the bliss of sunny days. Here or elsewhere. A whole string of uninterrupted sunny days. Mmmm...

scattered

One little key on my laptop was wobbly. It seemed loose and ready to fly – elsewhere. And so I made this evening the time to visit the Apple store.

What a time suck! It’s not that the blue-shirted wiz kids weren’t helpful. It’s just that they, as always, made me understand how utterly incompetent I am in the use of Apple stuff. So long as I was there, they untangled some muddles I had gotten myself into. But it took time.

(I promised to sign up for all kinds of classes to boost my skills. Someday.)

After, I pulled the red hot lover onto the Beltline (highway) and within seconds came to a near standstill. A traffic jam. It’s rare that a Madisonian has to endure an utterly clogged highway. I'm surely happy that this is not part of my everyday.


So long as I am in a tired and only mildly chipper mood, might I lodge a complaint about the weather?

I’ll just say this: may we please have some nice bright wintry stuff? It’s too warm, too gray, too wet, too dark..






No? Darn.

trapped

...in days of tense work schedules, I remain, much of the time, behind closed doors. No breakthrough or break time moments today. No time, no time...

That’s okay. Little tidbits remind me that life toddles forward in interesting ways, regardless of pressures and work priorities. For example: I come home late, but with the idea that we still have time for a Paul’s coffee. I pull up to the farmhouse. Ed comes out of the sheep shed,  greeting me with a mousetrap in hand.
I got one. We can let it out in the fields on the way to Paul’s.
He waves the little plastic box with a mouse in it in my face.
He was tricky. Ate the peanut butter the first time, the second time. This time I got him with pepper jack cheese.

And where was Isis in all this?

Don’t know. Not really paying attention to the mouse.

The cat has grown useless. Sort of like me, I imagine, once I reach the age of retirement. Or maybe before.

Ed releases the mouse into the field...





....the little guy runs like crazy across the snow crusted landscape. We wave good bye.

Will you now place the trap in the farmhouse? I ask. There haven’t been signs of mice since we came back, but I like the security of the trap, just in case one gray fellow passes through...
Soon, soon.

I think of Isis, the farmette cat. He hasn’t come to the farmhouse since it turned cold.  His paws don’t appear to like anything below 42 degrees. So he stays at the shed and watches mice dart this way and that. Fine cat. He’s lost his belligerence.

There's so much snappish anger out there. It's good that Isis has moved beyond that.

thanks

...for the sunshine! It helps to set out in the morning to this.






When the bright light shines down on Bascom Hill, even the snowman there looks good.






In the last semester, after my last class, Ed and I would meet at Paul’s café where I would re-energize myself for the remaining working hours of the day. We’re trying something different this winter: before the daylight fades, we’ll do a quick spin on the trails just to the east of the farmhouse. That’s the re-energizing moment. After, we’ll end the day at Paul’s, even if that means grabbing the final coffee when the light is long gone.

It’s a tough schedule to follow, but we’re trying. And today, we pulled it off.






True, the ski break was awkwardly icy. There’s not enough snow out there. And, there were places, adventurous places, where the trail spun downhill toward Lake Waubesa and I wondered whether Ed, or indeed either one of us, would be able to steer clear of the not quite fully frozen waters. You can’t quite stop on a downhill stretch, when that stretch is completely iced over.






In the end though, we were happy to be moving again. And we made it to Paul’s, just before he closed. Hi Paul. Back in Jerez, there was this artisan, making a little clay flute called the ocarina...

spring semester

I look outside my office window and I see a giant snowman on Bascom Mall (the expanse of hill just outside my office window). It's not a very attractive snowman -- not very photogenic in any event, but it's there, commemorating the beginning of the Spring Semester. He doesn't taunt, he just stands there, erect, steady, in your face big.

So the classes begin. A wet, sloppy beginning (not unpretty out here, at the farmette, though).





I suppose it's good that it isn't the typical soul-shattering cold spell that gets us into the swing of the new semester. But here's a hint: can we please have a bit of that good old Midwestern brilliant winter sunshine in the days ahead?

Thank you.

parks and (winter) recreation

Ed tells me – we should get our Dane County skiing permits. As we navigate the ins and outs of doing this online, we note that not all parks have groomed trails yet. It’s that kind of a winter – cold, but not (yet?) oozing with snow.

We want to get into the habit of skiing – as close to daily as possible. On this Sunday morning though, the weather is iffy. Freezing fog, I read to Ed. Meaning, bits of icy rain. Or something. The temps are in the twenties.

And it does feel that way – misty and icy.

We could go to our park just up the road, but Madison’s Elver Park is bigger and since it is a week-end, we can be more adventurous.






At Elver, it’s heartening to see so many skiers out today. Just like us. Early, despite the weather. And every now and then, there is the young skier. I was on wooden boards first when I was six. Old, compared to, say, this moderately enthusiastic cross country little one.






It’s not easy to be skiing on a day like today. Ed forgot his cap and very quickly, his hair develops a nice frozen mist of ice. White on white.






So there are the skiers. But not only.


 


Elver is Madison's great sledding destination. We pass by its large hill and I say to Ed that sledding has to be one of the most good and honest winter sports out there: so little equipment, so much joy. A man zips by in front of us on a rubber tube. His is possibly the longest of the downhill runs. He gets up grinning broadly. The best $30 I ever spent! – he shouts to us as he drags his beloved rubber tube up again.






Obviously not everyone loves the snow.
She gets cold – the dog owner tells me as I ask about the many layers of sweater and jacket on this park visitor:






But she’s the exception. On the trails you're likely to see only enthusiasm -- great gobs of it. And it's a fast enthusiasm. Ed and I are trail skiers. Most, these days, prefer skate skiing. It’s faster, for one thing. We get passed an awful lot. I mind less than Ed does.


Oh, but it’s a good way to spend a Sunday morning! Freezing fog notwithstanding.