gone

The ice on the lakes is gone. Melted. Disappeared. I see that this evening, on my way home.






Finally I am ready for her. Rosie, Rosie, come out already. I avoided you since November. Come out and ride!






With Rosie, I can speed, but I can slow down, too. For the beauty of the fields before me.





Remember these pauses? Yeah, Rosie, pause here for a second and then zip forward. Careful now, we’re in traffic. Have to watch those careless campus types. Have to remind myself what it’s like to be on a scooter.


A scooter ride is a good time to think. And here’s one small question that keeps nagging at me as I zip by on this unusually warm March evening – how many times in life are you put to the task of reinventing yourself? Me – often. If not that, then this. So often! And so I get used to change. I don’t question its presence. I assume that, yet again, I will have to consider something entirely different.

But as I scoot back to the farmette, I think – may it not be with the essentials of life anymore.


Ed is there, waiting when I finally roll in. It’s past 6, but the sun is still out. He asks – you want to hack away at some of the honeysuckle? We could work for a half hour or so..

I give it due consideration, but I know I cannot. My workweeks are too busy and too draining all at once.

I scramble eggs, cook up some broccoli and, too, make a salad. A poor excuse for supper, but at least it’s healthy.

at the end of a Sunday

Ed, please, you have to get up and wash off before dinner.

It’s Sunday evening. A quiet time, a lovely time, a time for family coming to the farmhouse for the evening meal.

With an hour more of evening daylight, I cook as folds of sunlight come through the window.





How can you not love spring?!


But Ed and I both need to scrub big time before food preparation. We’ve been working all day outside and it shows.

The farmette appears especially vast when you realize that there is never a portion of it that doesn’t need work. In the wee hours, we zip over to Walmart to pick up a better rake. And glyphosate (think Round-up)  for the honeysuckle stubs. Walmart is not the place where any serious person would buy a rake, but once again, it trumps all by virtue of its proximity.

On our way there, we see that the truck farmers (who farm the land just east of us) are already planting.  We wave. It's good to see them stir up bits of unfrozen soil.





Shopping done. I hold the rake to the side as Ed weaves his motorbike deftly along county roads.

Home now. I rake with pent up winter energy. We don’t bother to do this in the fall, but now, any place that has plants, bulbs, grasses – needs to be free of encumbrance, of spent leaves, free to take in the sun (even as it is a little disconcerting to be spotting new growth this early in the season).






And then we return to the honeysuckle in the prairie out back. Muscles tense as we chop, snap, and haul the heavy limbs of this menacing plant. Where do we haul it? Well, to another corner of the property. Sometime soon we’ll have to do a controlled fire here. Not today though. We’re already pushing our limits.





I know we don't yet deserve days like this quite this early in the season. Sure, I realize that there will be weeks when I need a scarf, a cap, gloves. That's another day's worry. If you live in the Midwest, I hope, like me, you were riding high on the burst of good weather. And I hope you loved it as much as I did.

land spreadin’ out so far and wide...

If you want to know in which area of life Ed and I have the most trouble acquiescing  to the peculiarities of the other, let me tell you, it's this: the matter of pruning trees. We both feel strongly about it and in a completely opposite way.

I want to prune, trim, cut – quickly, effectively and, I'll admit it -- sometimes not very wisely. Most of my mistakes nature will forgive.

Ed doesn’t want to prune at all. He lives by the motto that a tree knows best how to grow and expand and we’re just tampering with what nature intended.

Reading up on tree pruning has changed his mind only slightly. He now acknowledges that it probably is a good idea to saw off broken or dead branches. The rest – it pains him to cut into something that has sap running through it.


On this beautiful March day, we nonetheless take on tree trimming. My strategy is to acquiesce, back off and then proceed with a quick cut when he’s preoccupied with something else (like taking on the broken branches on the front maples).



 


It's not easy to figure out how to prune anything at the farmette. What I call the “orchard” is actually a clump of hugely overgrown, very old mixed fruit trees. None of these dwarf varieties that are so common in a modern orchard. We have monster trees. You couldn’t get to the fruits near the top unless you picked from the seat of a helicopter. It's not clear how to pare down the inside. We can't even reach the inside.  I snip randomly, Ed winces, we move on.





And now we come to the Carpathian walnut. Ed claims it is his favorite tree. Fine. I like it too, but it grows close to the door we use as the entrance and the leaves are big and the branches are getting a tad too invasive.

Give me a few minutes to think about it, he says, putting down the saw.

If you wont do it, I will.

No, no, I’ll get to it.

Now.

In a little bit.

I’m taking the saw from you!

And so we banter and dance around it until I threaten to take the whole tremendous limb down and sensing defeat, he exhales deeply, loudly, winces for effect and starts sawing.


In mid-afternoon, we pause for peanut butter on whole wheat.


And now the shadows are getting long. Still, we have the grand project of clearing the prairie out back. It has quite a lot of invasive honeysuckle. So you'd think Ed and I would struggle to reach a compromise with each mighty shrub. Hell no! 

Where honeysuckle’s concerned, Ed takes out the chain saw with a vengeance!






We chop, saw, haul, seal stumps and stubs until the sun sinks to the ground.





A day of good work.


In the evening, Isis comes over. He’d been stubbornly sticking to the sheep shed, but tonight he's here, wanting to share the farmhouse couch. We settle in for an evening of leftover vegetable soup and library movies.

Not for long.

There is a thump in the kitchen. We’ve been having an occasional visitors (random mice) and Ed has already sent two this past month to the fields west of us, but in recent days, we've been dealing with one who is a handful. She comes to the trap for the peanut butter, but she always manages to trigger it and close it shut before entering inside. We think she’s too fat for it.

Tonight, she cannot resist the whiff of the best peanut butter this side of Georgia. Despite the loud TV just to the side of the kitchen, despite lights gleaming, despite two robust people on the couch, with Isis purring between them, she comes, she pushes herself toward the peanut butter and she gets herself trapped.

Take her away! I beg. I’ve become more used to the need to occasionally catch mice, but I’ve become less happy with handling them once they’re trapped.

Ed rides his motorbike to the fields, I clean the floor, to rid the place of any trace of mouse.


You couldn't ask for a finer March day here, at the farmette.

momentary cold

Well, let’s cook up soup again. A pot of it – vegetables from the season and frozen ones from last year’s garden. Stir it up, stir it up – ahhhh, that warms you up!


I had a morning of hearings on campus and initially the idea was for me to bike to work. One poke outdoors and I gave up. I don’t like being cold. The birds that I’m hearing outside are made of stronger stuff.






Back in the seat of the red hot lover. I park, I walk. I detour. Past Lake Mendota – now that’s interesting! Nearly melted!






That’s encouraging.

In my office, the heating/cooling system is in its usual crazy between seasons spin. In my section of the building, it can’t be more than fifty. Forget it. Pack the bag, take stuff home.

...where I get distracted by cooking soup.





So, it’s a cold (in the thirties) day again, but I'm quite forgiving. I know what’s coming. Yep, we’ve all studied the weather charts. So go ahead, blow ye winds blow, I have the soup ready for dinner and I’ll go to sleep knowing that we’ll be waking up to something better tomorrow.

I trust weather people. (I think.)

finding gold

It’s still too cold to, say, take a leisurely stroll at the end of the day. If you’re walking, it better be brisk. And I’m still ignoring Rosie, my motorbike. Sometime in the coldest months (which everyone says weren’t that cold) I felt chilled and it’ll take a while to get me excited about sitting still on a scooter on anything but a warm day.

But the light each day is tremendous! Solid, stronger each day, longer too, of course, but mostly more brazen and bold – the kind that says I dare you to stay indoors.

Nonetheless, I stay indoors. This is the fussiness that comes with spring: anything less than forty is not good enough. Cold.

But the spring bulbs know better.





They're popping up! First one spotted this morning!

Me, I’m waiting for the warmth to take hold again. Soon, they say. Hold your breath and count to three. Give or take.

rerun

Run that day by me again, wont you? Hey, thanks! Sixty-three degrees. Oh, that makes me so happy!

Outside, I see them – buds. The lilac by the house is springing plump little buds.





And the birds! What noise outside in the morning! Incredible.

It’s a workday. Walking to my office, walking from my office – that’s pretty much the extent of my “spring frolic.” And still, on the walk in, I could appreciate the fact that there were people eating outdoors on library mall. In Wisconsin. On March 7th. Incredible.






Then -- here’s a little treat: as I walk down Bascom Hill, I hear a shout. Another one, louder. I look over my shoulder – ohhh, I know that person! In a rare confluence of schedules we’re both walking the same way, the same time.






My daughter. A rare pleasure. As is the weather.


Later, much later I arrive home at the farmette. The rain starts. Heavy drops, sometimes accelerating, sometimes slowing down. I pick up an old rake that Ed keeps in the storage shed. We need one for just leaves, I tell him, all the while knowing that these are wasted words. If there is a rake here already, any rake – that’ll do.
Do you want me to move some chips with a pitchfork? -- he asks.

Okay.

I rake chips, then I rake last year’s leaves off flower beds. The rain comes down, on and off, on and off and still, it’s warm outdoors. 

An early spring evening. It could be a false start, an accidental detour before the next ice storm, but I don’t think so. Two days in a row with 63 – that’s no serendipitous dip, that’s a surefire trend.

63 degrees

Well now, that’s spring! 63 degrees. Sunshine, too. Snows of yesterday? Nearly gone!

A day when students slide into warm weather mode. Bare feet in the first photo, shorts in the second.











March is a new month for me at the farmhouse. I moved here on April 20th. I never experienced this cusp of spring period – the earlier wake up, the later sunset and... the first joy of this:





The desire to get going—to rake up the old leaves, to trim bushes, trees, to clear spaces – all that is so palpable, so real and suddenly – so close in time.


Evening. Ed heaves woodchips, raking them into spaces where we want to stifle weeds, especially the ever-threatening creeping charlie.

After, he does what I recognize as the farmhouse dusk pause. My grandma, back in Poland, took this same pause at the end of the day. To Ed, it’s nothing more than a moment with Isis. For me, it’s the most profoundly rewarding time of quiet. Ufff... Another day...





Ed plays volleyball tonight, I cook our Spanish favorite (from our January travels) – the poorman’s shrimp salad – filled with potatoes, so that it may stretch over several days.


I’m done with winter thoughts. From now on, I’m tracking the sprouting bulbs. Last year, I see that the first crocus bloomed on March 28th. This year? Oh, I think that any day now there’ll be that first flower.

sunrise, sunset

The good thing is that much will change beginning Sunday.

Say what? Things will change?

Daylight savings is coming around to herald spring.

In the meantime, you know it's Monday. You know I'm dead from too many hours of class time.

You know, too, that if there is a pretty glimpse of early morning sun on the (possibly last) snow outside, I'll be there, admiring it.





...and if there is a lovely fading light scene on my drive back from work, I'll pull over.




In between? Not a spare minute. Not even one.

where has all the color gone?

If yesterday I could hardly decide which garden was worthy enough, colorful enough, delightful enough for inclusion here, today presented no such dilemma. Early in the morning Ed asks – want to ski? I mumble – uh huh, and shortly after ten we’re on our boards. (Midwesterners are of few words and I understand why that is so – don’t open your mouth if you don’t have to...keeps the flies out in the summer, conserves energy in winter.)

Most assuredly it is our last ski run this year. Despite the “heavy” snows of Friday, there are places where the ski picks up most of the white stuff,  so that the person behind gets to glide on Dalmatian like terrain.

Still, we have a fine little run.






Black and white, yes, that. (Oh, where are the Berkeley pinks and yellows?






In Wisconsin, right now, even the birds are black and white.)






So, goodbye winter, right? The week ahead has a warming trend and after that, we’ll be looking for buds and the emergence of the first crocus, no? I'm hoping.

the last threads

Ready for some trite words? Here they come:

There isn’t a trip that I take where I don’t learn something – about stuff and, too, people -- even those whom I thought I had figured out. And just getting that different perspective, on the world, on others, adds years to my life. (Or at least it adds greater complexity which, in reality, is the same thing, since a more intricate and detailed life seems longer, even if it is not really so.)

It’s amazing how much you can learn, too, if you just spend a day or two listening to someone. It may be that I learned more about my mom on this trip than perhaps in all the years when she lived in Madison, where my interaction with her, though daily, was about such things as kid events and the terrible weather out there.

In the years before she moved to Madison, meaning, before my kids were born, I was her go to person. The one she’d call to express sorrow. There were many such calls.

It became a pattern with my first family (of mother, father, sister) – to review the past and how it affected us before and affects us still. It is so not in my nature to review the past, that I have grown accustomed to giving myself a pep talk before engaging in these conversations, in much the same way that I give myself a pep talk before I enter a class when I’m not feeling well. Come on, Nina: it’s important. Take a breath and give it a go! You’ll be fine, you’ll be fine...



Early this morning, I take my usual solo walk. It is glorious day and I think even Berkeley people are surprised by it because I hear a bit of that from people I pass – isn’t it an incredible day! It’s such a beautiful day, no?











Of course, I am more focused on flowers than on the blue sky. One thing I get plenty of back home is blue sky. Flowers in early March? Not so much.











Shattuck Avenue is buzzing and it’s fun to see how it all conforms to the images one has of Shattuck and of Berkeley. My mother would say that Berkeley has changed – more militant on the streets, more conservative on campus. Maybe. But here on Shattuck,  I’m seeing an awful lot of women my age with long gray hair tied back in pony tails. They sit in cafes with large rimmed hats to keep the sun from the skin. They eat yogurt with organic this and that. Everything in Berkeley is organic. My B&B is on the inexpensive side, if you compare it to prices in the Bay area, but even there, the shampoo is organic. It’s just the way Berkeley is.






My mother meets me for brunch at a local café. Neither of us is hungry – we ate breakfast at our respective places – but we want this last chance to sit across the table from each other. I want to ask her a burning question – one that I have carried with me for years. (Don’t we all have one burning question for our parents that we wish we could get an answer to?)





I don’t ask it. I don’t know that it was the right call. My mom is older. Older people think they will not survive 'til the next year. Their children think they’ve got at least another ten years ahead. My grandma lived until her nineties, why shouldn’t my mom – the person who has tracked Prevention Magazine and all other preventives for such a long time live even longer?!


We ride the BART together. No, really – this is my mother: she will take the one and a half hour trip with me to the airport, even knowing that once there, I will check in and go through and that will be that.



My flight takes off. We pass mountains and lakes and all great land formations.





I’ll forever remember this visit. Time has passed. The future – our future, hers and mine – is pretty much set. So we are where we are, with all our imperfections and for once they seem irrelevant.

a day in the life

I let my mother plan this day for us. I’m here to take part in her life, not to set an outsider’s agenda.

But first things first. Before she shows up to pick me up, Mort, my host at the B&B, brings up a breakfast tray...






There is a blizzard heading for Madison today. I look outside the window of my Berkeley rooms and take note of this alternate landscape.






I ask Mort to suggest a quick walk for me before my mom comes. He says --  Go up the next street – interesting architecture, beautiful gardens. You’ll come across a middle school with an "edible school yard." Take a look at it.

I’m off. For my mom, seeing things in bloom is rather commonplace. Last night I commented on the feeling of green around me. She shrugged. Spring’s long gone, she tells me.

So I walk alone now, just for a few blocks, to take pleasure in all that greenery and of course, in the school kitchen garden, which you might know is Alice Waters'  brainchild.




the Garden Cottage b&b





























(On one side of the school yard, I find the garden, on the other side -- a boy shooting a few baskets...)





A serene and bountiful morning.


I then give in to being my mom's companion for the day.

We do what she does. Senior water aerobics. Every weekday of the year, she is in an outdoor community pool, doing water aerobics. And so I join. True, I’m hesitant. When she first tells me to bring my swimsuit, I say what a kid would say to her mom – yeah, yeah, sure... But I intend not to use it. It’s 55 degrees outdoors! The last thing a frozen Wisconsin soul wants to do is to experience outdoor cold again!

But I change my mind. I want her day to be my day. I want to listen to the banter of the seniors pushing against the pool water. The leader is playing music from the sixties. Several of the seniors know the lyrics. I know the lyrics. I’m in the pool in Berkeley, singing sixties music with area seniors who surely remember that Berkeley from that epoch. It’s all very transformative. Suddenly, California, that state that always felt so out there, feels a little less strange and distant.


We eat lunch at Slow. Delicious sandwiches, mine with an array of good veggies. Perhaps the best part is that it’s sunny and we can eat outdoors. Surely it must be in the sixties now. Berkeley in the sixties. Makes me smile.

I follow her to favorite haunts. The dollar ice cream store. A cone for a buck? Really? She speculates that it must be a brainchild of a do-gooder who believes in keeping things affordable.





More stops. This one’s for me – to cater to my idiosyncrasies. A coffee at a local café.

And then we’re back at her place. I had toyed with the idea of doing some taped conversations. I had done that with my dad a couple of years back and so I have a treasure trove of detail from his life, right there, in the files of my computer. My mom talks less in a monologue, more with spontaneous bursts of stories and opinions and I do think that I remember her words very well – they have force and vigor and that helps – and still, having it on tape would be nice...

But I don’t record. My mom isn’t happy with technology, with recordings and so I don't want to suggest it. She hasn’t the trust, or the indifference to it all. She’s not a fan of my blogging and I am careful what I put on Ocean, because I do not want to make her unhappy with me, not now, not today, not when this day is so very lovely.

We end the evening with dinner at the retirement home. She has invited her closest friends and I have to say that the meal is, for me, a wonderful set of hours. I get it. I see her with them and them with her and I understand. And, too, I understand, I think, my place in this thicket of events and relationships.





Late, late, very late for her, somewhat late for me even, I go back to the B&B. I think about all the things that I could do for my mom and all the things that I haven’t done and cannot do. I think about her supreme generosity, her take on life, the accommodations she has made. I help her “downsize” tonight. I “disencumber” her of two albums of photos. The oldest in these is of my grandmother when she was just seven (taken in 1908).





There are many reasons to feel happy tonight, there are some to feel a tad more somber. I’ll stay with the happy. I’m predisposed in that direction.


[P.S. Several commenters have noted problems with posting comments on Ocean. I removed some safeguards (even as I'll stick with moderating stuff -- just to keep things kind and gentle here). Please do let me know if this helps or if you still experience issues.]

Berkeley

Everyone knows that to get to California, a Midwesterner has to fly over flatlands, badlands, highlands – all of it. It may be half the distance (and half the flying time) to Europe, but to me, California always seemed remote.

And it shouldn’t. You’d probably be surprised to know that most of my first cousins live in California. (My mother’s brother moved there.) I never see them. My extended family, too, feels remote. We grew out of different worlds, on different continents, overlapping not in any way, except with a shared bloodline. I don’t even quite know what my cousins do in life, though I have to say, I did truly like their father – my uncle. He was a very happy soul and I think I share some of those problem-avoidance genes.

My mother moved to California first to care for her mother, who, in turn, had moved to California (from Poland) to care for her son, who probably didn’t need care, but he was her golden boy and letting her do this made both of them feel better.

When my grandma died (and soon after, my uncle died), my mom trudged back to Wisconsin to keep tabs on my growing girls, but when they grew up and were ready to move on, she went right back to California, choosing to settle in the same retirement place where her own mother lived her last years of life.

My mom will turn 89 this year. She is as sharp as ever – well, arguably sharper, because her nose is stuck nearly full time in the world of books, newspapers and magazines. She’s a political hound, too and I have to think that she is disappointed that I never want to engage her on those topics (to my credit, I think I’m an okay listener). People might describe her as radically to the left of things. I think the picture is a tad more complicated.



After classes, I catch that flight – out of a tired Wisconsin, over the snow-covered flatlands, badlands, etc etc






... to arrive by early evening at San Francisco International.


 


It says a lot about my mother that she made the tremendous effort of coming by BART to the airport to greet me upon arrival.

We take that same BART back and I leave my bag at the adorable Garden Cottage B&B (actually, it’s just a home with two rental units) in Berkeley, just a few blocks from her own residence. I admire the fact that there are things blooming right now and I don’t mean just a shrub or two.

We eat a very fresh and honest supper at a local Thai place. Called Your Place.





I think about how my parents arranged their retirement years (in his case – from a diplomatic career, in her case – from care-giving and taking on odd jobs just to keep the income flowing). They seem to like where they are. The fit is good. He is 100% Polish, she has a lot of America in her. He survived World War II in Warsaw, she survived the slums of Detroit, New York and later, of a destroyed Warsaw. Berkeley suits her. Warsaw suits him.

Me, I choose a restored farmhouse south of Madison. Even as I am awfully envious of this Berkeley garden outside, lush as anything now, on the first day of March.

the cat, the bird and things thereafter

We wake to spring, we close the day to winter, or some horrible in-between season that has the worst elements of them all. I’m growing used to this.

Let me remember the good beginnings to the day.

Isis, coming out to greet me.






That cardinal. The beautiful brilliant bird in a tangle of bare branches.






There. Recorded.


At the farmhouse, my to-do list swells. I leave for Berkeley immediately after teaching tomorrow. Let me turn away from Ocean, just for a little while, until tomorrow, or soon after.