Georgia

No no, I’m not really in Georgia. But anyone who was anywhere near Madison today would nod her or his head sympathetically. It was steamy warm – as you’d imagine the weather might right now in, say, Georgia.

It’s taking a while to sink in that I actually needn’t fly this Thursday morning to campus for an early morning class. I wake up, get up, recoil, go back to bed and doze blissfully into the late morning.

Breakfast – it might as well be brunch. At this late hour it feels so decadent, so incredibly indulgent. And because of Georgia out there, with pouty clouds that now and then release their heavy rains making it that much more steamy, we can eat out on the porch. Bare feet outside, bare anything in fact – arms, legs, you name it. Georgia.

I move from one clump of flowers to the next, feeding, clipping, assessing. That is my day.

And this week we remember our local market! It’s an afternoon affair and that makes it even more leisurely. Don’t need to rush at all, it’s barely starting when we show up after a café break at Paul’s.

Flowers, herbs and beautiful asparagus!

And our favorite bakery, La Baguette, is back this year! Could it be more French? She is making crepes, with nutella or jams or sugars, fresh crepes, spooned carefully onto the crepe maker and if that isn’t reason enough to make your way out here to the Fitchburg market, I don’t know what is.

Ed and I sit back for a while and watch. Warm air, the fragrance of something on the griddle, people moving slowly from one stand to another. Ed nibbles on a pain au chocolat, I occasionally lean over and steal a bite and we continue in this way until it seems too decadent, too overstepping our very loose boundaries of what must be done next.

Ed has an errand and I do as well. His is boring, mine – less so. Three perennials to pick up for the ever expanding beds. I walk between the tables at Johannsen’s Nursery...


 


...remembering when this store first began selling these hardy flowers and remembering, too, how carefully I planned my beds then – height, texture, bloom time – it all mattered. Now the beds are less articulated, less organized.

Back at the farmette, I pick weeds, take pots outside, clip off spent blooms, yes, the usual, until  it’s dinner time. It’ll be asparagus and eggs again, but this time, not out of a hurried indifference to food, but because the asparagus was there at the market, thin and freshly picked that day and eggs are a delicious accompaniment.

After, I take out the nasturtium seeds. You plant them after the danger of frost is past. It’s Georgia! Of course it’s past!

Ed and I work in the garden until there is no more light left. Dusk, made slightly brighter by the faint light of the moon...

Steamy Georgia hours. Slow, perfect and perfectly beautiful.

so many flowers, so little time

I’m trying to get the last lecture, a difficult lecture, a supremely difficult lecture together. Ed is firing off questions about a case, an out of the blue unrelated case that he is intensely curious about. I tell him – you’re a distraction!

It is often like that. Ed is a distraction. I like, nay, love working at home. But I have to work around the idea that Ed throws out queries and usually they are hard to ignore.

By the time I post this I’ll be officially after the spring semester and onto the summer months. My teaching will have ended, my need to wake up early, super super early will be behind me.

Dinner – I will have wiped clear traces of it. Washed plates and chopsticks, discarded boxes that once held the Chinese take out.

This spring, the story that I tell my students at the close of the semester is different from previous ones. I tell them about my grandmother and her insatiable desire to bring a smile to the faces of her two granddaughters. I don't look for stories to pass on. They come to me and when they do, I tell them.

At the end of the school year, I get in my law school mailbox a sprinkling of notes from kind hearted students. You may hear endless complaints about this generation of young people who know how to take and not once give back – let me tell you, so many of the ones I’ve come across know how to give back and then some. Today, I found in my mailbox one of the most beautifully written notes ever and I paused a great while to think – how is it that he found the time to do this, to want to share something positive with a random teacher in his law school years?

Law school is a funny place. You come with great expectations, you lose a good three years of your life and a hefty sum of money to get through it all and then you’re done and so often you don’t think back to what just happened. You’re done, for Pete’s sake, you’re done! Move on! Finally! Your spouse, girlfriend, cat, mother, father, all those who love you are so happy you’re out of there!

And I am too. I'm happy for you. But for one brief second, I remember the time you, the student said something incredibly endearing, risky, funny, clumsy, from the heart special and I think -- wow, I'm so sorry to see you leave and move on.

So I’m working hard tonight – I have to turn in exam questions by daybreak – but I’m also thinking about my grandma and her sticking a gift, her gift, actually nothing more than a bunch of frozen chicken breasts into my bag when last I visited her, just before she died. That’s all she had to give by then. Despite dementia, despite all that was wrong with her, she rambled over to her freezer and reached for those chicken breasts.

 There are some things that you just never forget.

fields of dreams

Time. The most valuable resource. I’d do a crazy busy schedule any day just to have what’s coming – a feeling of time. And space, so that when I look out, I see more than just what’s in front of my nose. It’s hard to look beyond your living room when you haven’t the time to venture further.

our farmer, working the fields down the road

Today was harried, tomorrow will be crazed, then will come a few days of normal and after that – time.

How is it that we, with our work ethic and endless growth obsession, never admit to how valuable, desirable, luxurious it is to have merely time? And I don’t mean time to do nothing (though if that’s your goal at the end of the day, then why not?). But time to be yourself in charge of the next hour and the one after? 

fields of growth, fields of future dreams

The neighbor across the road plants trees. Rows and rows of them. For your grandchildren, right? Ed teases him. (Rows of trees in fields of dandelions. To see him tend those trees is to know what it is to be content.)

Success, as measured by time. Pour resources into banking time.

Before it runs out on you.

for the birds

The last ever of the crazy Mondays. In a bold move, I bike to work. But I haven’t the time! Make time! I’m tired – Isis was at it all night long. Such excuses! Get going!

You know I haven’t the time to write tonight. But, don’t you think it's curious how I was not alone on the morning and then evening ride? How I was always in the company of these winged creatures? 

Beautiful birds. On, off water, watching, taking off. My escorts today.

Step aside deer. Not your turn. This last April moment is for the birds. 

Oh fine. You too.

growing things

Despite the chilliness in the air, Ed and I are ready to do some catch up work in the yard. For me, that means, finally, filling in some of the flower pots and putting in new ideas into the shadier portions of the garden.

It’s all about the entrance, I tell myself. How you enter your home sets the stage for how you feel once inside. So the path up to the front door (which is really the back door, but remains our main and only functional entrance) has to be aglow with welcoming blooms.

 

But I have to work around what’s already there. Tiger lilies to one side. A rhubarb plant that is out of control, producing far more rhubarb than any sane person is likely to want in her lifetime, let alone a summer season. And yes, I know about rhubarb pie and rhubarb compote and freezing rhubarb and I have bags of it still from last year, which surely indicates that we like rhubarb in theory, but have trouble understanding its usefulness, being less dessert inclined than the average rhubarb loving person out there.

And I have to work with cracking clay pots. Until they can no longer sustain their pot like shape, we keep them. Even if they look live been through a couple of cyclones and at least one major hurricane.

 

Come summertime, life, my life, our life is all about looking out at the world from behind the screens of the porch. That’s been an elusive thing thus far, since the burst of hot March air has been trampled over by its polar opposite. But the day will come when we will sit out there and admire all that’s growing just beyond the fine mesh. I think about that now, as I continue to plant.

Ed adds an extension to the raised flower bed, I put in 48 annuals into the clay pots (because that’s how many you can buy for $17.95 at Johannsen’s) and half a dozen remaining perennials elsewhere. Another batch of perennials will come from the east coast in a couple of weeks. Why I need to order perennials from Connecticut when we have, within a half dozen miles, enough perennials to fill every yard in Madison is beyond Ed, but tradition has it that I say my thanks to the place out east that pushed me to love perennials and so I buy some plants from the people at the White Flower Farm as well. Just a small batch. But I look forward to its arrival. 

So it continues, this wonderful protracted planting season. With pauses. To twiddle thumbs, listen to the sandhills, play with Isis. 

 

Things have settled down somewhat. Planting continues. And that’s a good thing.

different strokes

My mom sent a New Yorker clipping of an article on couch surfing.  Here’s what happens: you join an organization of couch surfers and you’re given a list of places where you can spend a night on someone’s couch. At no charge.

I tell her that not only had I already read that same piece (with amusement), but, in fact, Ed has been talking of couch surfing, house swapping and all things similar for years now. I've listened to him, but without great enthusiasm. My response to him has been -- There’s no free lunch! You’ll be reading a book and I’ll be left to make idle conversation with the lonely people of this world (by which I mean the hosts: why else would you otherwise put up with random strangers on your couch...). No thank you.

Today, Ed is at it again. He’s showing me another site – campinmygarden.com. The idea is the same, except you don’t stay on a couch, you pitch a tent, with access to bathrooms, sometimes kitchens, always with a beguiling green space for your overnight respite.

Here’s one in Italy! You like Italy! He brings up a link to someone’s beautiful garden, overlooking hills and olive groves. At about $15 per person it’s not exactly free, but nor is it up there with summer room rentals.

Next year maybe, I tell him, figuring that by then I’ll probably be in a wheelchair or otherwise incapacitated and he’ll have to reconsider. “Next year” has always felt, for me, like a long time away.

Ed counters -- When I finish building the writer’s shed, we could reciprocate. Have people stay there if they want to come to Madison, or go kayaking on the lakes.

I see where this is heading. I’m quickly becoming a b&b proprietor, only without the benefits of – well, income, for one thing.

I shake my head and say nothing more. Time is always on my side. Ed doesn’t finish projects quickly. There’s still a dormer of the farmhouse that is pinkish brown instead of Caribbean yellow.

It was a cold Saturday. Ed and I filled cupboards with Woodman’s groceries. He noted that I wasn’t smiling much. He was right.

Even so, I have never known Ed to lay claim on me, my mood, my preoccupations. He has never objected to days like this – when I spend a significant chunk of time trying to ascertain how someone else, not him, but someone else is getting along. If I had to scoot down to help a person from my past, he’d help me figure out how best to do it.

Later in the day, Ed and I sit at the lemon-draped kitchen table and I tell him -- thank you. And, too, for letting me do what I have to do, for letting me write about him, here on Ocean. Ed has had to adjust from being a completely private guy, more so than perhaps anyone else I know, to being part of my story here.

He munches his prepared by me peanut butter sandwich and says – don’t you think these are all small things? What you said, whom you described on Ocean – when we’re dead and gone, will it make anything worse for anyone? No? Then stop fretting and write what you want to write.

Out of eight years of blogging, only three times have I agreed to reword a post upon someone’s request. I did it earlier today. I’m thinking unless I make a gross error or cause someone great harm, I’ll never do that again.

thoughts

Friday mornings Ed goes off. Call it a work day. Tech meetings, business meetings – compressed into this one day at the place of his business venture.

Soon Fridays will be, for me, no different from any other days. Classes end this coming week and my trips to campus thereafter will trickle down to few and far between. I took a pay cut and stopped working summers last year and it was the best decision I ever made. After exam grading, the summer months are my own.

But today still blends with my class days and my thoughts glide back and forth between work, non work, and all things in between.

When I wrote my first post on Ocean, now more than eight years ago, my then husband asked me to consider not writing about, for example, him. Not an uncommon request. People don’t like being described by others. The writers often get it wrong, even as, arguably, they are not writing about another, they are writing, in a roundabout way, about themselves.

When I was in the thick of my divorce, many Ocean readers did not even know I was going through a divorce. That couldn’t happen in the more modern incarnation of Ocean. I no longer avoid the difficult topics, even as I don’t tend to dwell on them.

I tell myself someday I will dwell on them, putting the perspective I often find missing when people recount drama in their lives. Someday. When I learn to trust my own instincts as to what is right for Ocean.

But, for now, the “take charge” impulse that always, always pushes me forward has me in the garden today and I attack the raspberry patch with zest. I don’t want order, I don’t want neatness, I just want to clip and remove spent growth because it’s too ghostly in there among twigs that no longer want to sustain life.

In the morning, at least there are rays of sun.

In the afternoon, skies are gray.

I huddle indoors with my computer and think about how you can never avoid the twists and turns in life and then I stop thinking about it all and turn my attention to thoughts of summer and ferns unfurling, etc etc.

beauty

An email pops into my mailbox: the countdown begins! Your classmates, teachers (and sundry others) will be coming together on May 4^th! It’s an invitation to take part.

But here’s the thing. I went to grade school at UNIS – the United Nations International School in New York. This is a reunion of our lot. But my classmates wont be there! They’re scattered in all parts of the world. They come from faraway and they return to faraway.

And here’s the other thing about elementary school reunions: they should not suggest that I’ll be among my pals and teachers too. My teachers are likely dead. Or with dementia. My favorite teacher (math, from Denmark, Mr Rydstrom) was forty when I was eleven. Do the arithmetic. That would make him now 88. At best he is at a pleasant retirement home overlooking the North Sea doing sudoku. No way will he be at the reunion.

We are almost in May. Yet, when I biked to work, the cold wind knocked me around so much that I explained to my morning class that at least at the outset, I could not see them. My eyes were glazed over – and this from a person who always wears glasses.

May (and I know we’re not actually in May, but close enough) – it’s a peculiar month. It’s dealt me some punches. May – the month of near death in infancy, the month of major surgery at age 12, at age 21, at age 24 (indeed, I have had no surgeries outside of that month), the month of my brain hemorrhage, the month of break up, of a friend’s death, of weird acting out, of lust, of greed, of wanting.

May’s a regular bell ringer!

I’m calmer now. It takes a bit more to rile me.

Today (true, it’s April still) I come home tired. I had biked to work, there’s that.

   

It’s the end of the teaching week – there’s that as well.
 

At the farmette, I plant, pull, and then, exhausted,  I fall back on the couch and Ed and I eat scrambled eggs for dinner. True, with asparagus, but still – eggs. I worry that  it is a mark of inspirational decline.

On the upside, I pour an Aperol spritz into a tall glass and watch it disappear. How so? Well, Ed, who dislikes most any alcoholic beverage (except the once a month dark beer) took to this bitter orange fizzy concoction like someone raised on it. Weird.

I love this time of the year, of life, of dreamy expectations. But there’s a challenge to love. I’m well aware of it.

Such a complicated existence this is. No wonder Voltaire stood committed to growing one’s garden. It is an “extraordinarily effective way to keep busy.”

shift focus

This afternoon I was in such a hurry that I banged the nonexistent front fender of the red hot lover on the parking garage cement post. The tape that is on the car, hiding the fact that it doesn’t really have fenders, was torn to shreds. The beauty of having a terribly ugly old car is that you don’t care about any of this. When I park the car next to Ed’s truck, I routinely let the door swing open so that it bangs into the pickup. It’s a very satisfying sound.

I know what made this an especially edgy day – I was tired. Isis decided to spend the night in and out of the farmhouse. Happy to sit on the couch with us. Restless once we retired. Wants to go out. Wants to come back in. Out. In. And so on, all night long. (The cat door would solve all Isis issues, but I resist it nonetheless. For many reasons.)

Late in the day, at Paul’s café, I contemplate taking a nap. No. It’s my email catch up time. I cannot.

But when we finally come back to the farmhouse, I know I need to let go of it all. Ed takes off to ride his Wednesday Night bike ride and I lose myself in the flower beds. Dig this weed out, move that plant over, scratch the earth, stomp the soil – finally, relief!

An hour later, I feel whole again.

I look around me with the older camera in hand. Yes, this is the last of early spring. 

The last of the lilac season. Let me frame the farmhouse one last time in its majestic purple.

What’s the sequence? Which plants bloom next, after the bulbs, the fruits and the lilacs? There’s always a bit of mystery to it. No matter how many spring seasons you’ve gone through, you can never quite predict what’s next.

Maybe the lilies of the valley?

Maybe.

I go inside and reheat the vegetable soup. Ed will say it's always best the second day. Like spring, like flowers, like anything else that feels good. It feels even better the second day.

growing things

There’s a time when I think cursing is permissible, indeed, warranted. For example, when your hours of work are on a day that promises sunshine, gentle breezes and that perfect spring combination of cool and warm. And here’s where you can really sound off – when you read that by the time you get to your days off on the weekend, the sun will disappear, the rains will come and the deep chill will set in. I mean, really?

After work, Ed and I meet at Paul’s and that's fine, quite nice in fact, but I am depleted. You could say that the high point of the work day had been bringing coffee cakes from Florida to one of my classes. (Each of my classes has had a treat moment – this was the day to honor the morning bunch.)

It's early evening. I tell Ed we should be going home and putting in the last of the blueberries. The rains are coming. We want everything to have a home by the time the soil turns to clayish mud.

We make our way home. 

Huh?  What’s that?

We see the Dan truck (Dan is our guy with the heavy machinery that will transform every deranged acre of weeds into usable land), and the telltale white van belonging to Lee (she’s the truck farmer working the fields across the road), right there at the farmette.

Well now!

Dan has plowed the field out back and now he’s rototilling it. Lee is standing, hands on hips, keeping an eye on things.

We have a resolution! It's done now. For better, for worse, we've embarked on this farming project and now we have tilled land and an orchard sprouting buds and it all feels very right, very fitting. 

Dan’s an affable guy and if you hire him to do your tilling (and you should, he’ll haul that piece of machinery over land that I swear looks like no good thing could ever grown there and make it look suddenly farmable)...

...you’ll hear a few jokes, a story (or two), and you may get a grandchild (or two) accompanying him and it all makes you feel deeply satisfied – as if you’ve finally figured out where those missing puzzle pieces are and now you’re on a good track, doing something that adds value – perhaps not to your land, but surely to humankind. Last I heard, there’ll be an acre of cucumbers growing there for Wisconsin farmers' markets. Or was it beans? Or strawberries? It’s in Lee’s hands now. We stay out of this part of farming.

But we don’t stay out of our own plots and plans. We put in two more blueberries this evening and we'll transplant three others to our newly forming blueberry patch. Ed’s bringing in something to mix into the soil – to make it more blueberry friendly, as it were.

Where did you get that? – I ask.

Oh, well, you know.

Ed, how old is that bag of..whatever?

Sulfur. It's agricultural sulfur. Maybe ten twelve years...

You think it’s still potent?

Look at it!
That tells me nothing at all.

You know we should have improved the soil months, many months before putting these blueberries in...

Would that have changed our planting habits?

Maybe you shouldn't admit on your blog that we planted blueberries. My meter tells me we're still at pH 7 (an unacceptable level for blueberries).

I’m smiling at this exchange. So Ed. So me.

Night time. I make soup. Vegetables. Onion, garlic, cabbage. Mushrooms, carrots, parsnips. Frozen tomatoes from last year’s garden. Frozen corn from last year’s market.

It’s as if I can’t even remember how horribly tired I am from 48 hours of tough work demands.

Monday

The wind, or something (what?) caused shirts to set sail.

I wish I had found my gloves before revving up rosie.

I wish, too, that the work day ended gracefully, with a fine meal, instead of clumsily, without the prospect of good food. In the end, takeout sushi saved the night.

At home, we remain befuddled as to who, why and when wants to farm the acre out back.

I have no more insights on this. It’s Monday. I’m stumbling through the hours, wishing there were just a few more so that I could take a break. With a nap somewhere in there maybe. 

Yes? I can you say?

Okay!

events and returns

The past twenty-four hours were richly decorated by the presence of my girls, their guys, and my landlord. (That would Ed, who remains, otherwise, without title. Or, who allows me to make up titles as I see fit. Same difference.)

Glowing moments. I’m at an age where daughters are so enjoyable that it hurts – like it does at the side of your ribs, when you’re laughing too hard.

I'm the parent still, but there are no more corrections to be made, instructions to be conveyed. I remember sitting at the Cuban café in Miami Beach. A rather young woman, with a baby straddling her hip was saying goodbye to her own mom (the baby’s grandmother). The grandmother smiled down at the kid, then instinctively pulled her daughter’s loose and revealing shirt up higher, so that it would reveal just a little less. Oh! These are such familiar impulses! Pull down the short skirt, pull up your shirt, up, down, up, down – look after yourself, please, look after yourself!

That's not my role now. Suggesting, prompting -- it's all much more subtle and nuanced when they're adults and you're even older.

I came back to Madison in the early Saturday afternoon. Ed picks me up at the airport and together we make our way to Monona Terrace. There is an Earth Day event and we find seats to listen to the featured speaker – Mark Bittman. In the older days, Ed and I were quite taken with Mark Bittman's video clips on the NYTimes website.  He cooked up simple meals, always with a sort of nonchalant manner, as if failure was not possible because, after all, it's all in the eyes of the beholder. Lately, he’s moved away from food writing in favor of food advocacy and I suppose he agreed to speak in Madison because we're the kind of place where he'd be well received. 

And he was.

He spoke more about the rather obvious food evils out there, but that’s okay – this is what he's focusing on, this is what draws out his passions these days.

Home now. Ah, home! Movies are made, books are written about this fact of going home: it feels good! familiar and grand, all at once. The Madison skyline is luminescent, the truck farmers are working in the fields around us (not our field -- that project may have to be stalled for a year)...

Yeah, home.

Where good kids make good things happen.

she's hearing good news about their future home

The day is cool but clear and bright. I'm up for a country walk, though not before I show off the progress in our various gardens. It's spring -- the time where you see few failures and lots of hopeful signs of growth.

We take a walk. A country stroll that belongs to my favorites around here.

Out beyond, where deer scamper and birds croon, life feels good. Sweet and reassuring. A quiet world where you can hear each distinctive bird and wonder at its song..

In the evening we eat. It’s a jovial birthday meal and Ed only looks like he’s skeptical about the whole enterprise. Ah yes, there's that arm... and a sweet treat with a candle...

Happy birthday? Yes, very, very much so.

Sunday morning brunch at the farmhouse. Cookies from Miami Beach. With guava jam in their centers.

Frittatas with spring veggies, mango, sweets. And good, strong coffee.

Final moments: we visit the house my older daughter and her fiancée are soon likely to call home. One more, just one more photo where I have my two girls at my side, before the little one and her guy head home, to Chicago.

And then, the wild weekend with all those good elements winds down.

Wait. A small errand still. Ed and I drive up to the Flower Factory, for replacement flowers. Just a few. The place of Midwest's best perennials is quiet now. As if the cool weather scares people away from thinking about flowers.

And now, finally, we're back at the farmette. Ed and I walk the land. Taking stock of the orchard, thinking, scheming -- contemplating possible expansions, or no expansion at all.

There's something to be said for growing within what's allotted to you at this moment, rather than expanding your options. Keep it simple. Do well with what's there. Maybe. 

I've always regarded my birthday as the first real initiation into spring. Daffodils and tulips -- the first good cut flowers. It's just so remarkable that the best growing months are still ahead of us. I'm humbled by that, really I am.

April 21

But I like my birthdays! I say to Ed, even though I know the whole topic makes him nervous. He can’t drop his life’s conviction that celebrations are ridiculously bloated and overdone. That may be, but I think back to my day of encountering birthdays in Italy -- when I had the pleasure of witnessing three such celebrations – familial events mostly and all I remember seeing is grinning and laughter and it didn’t seem that bloated to me at all.

When I scheduled my Miami trip, I could have stretched it through the week-end. People do that. Conferencing is over, you take a day to do some fun things. Me, I was in a hurry to get home.

When I was a kid my mom told me that what I did on the first day of the new year (calendar or birth) would be my destiny for the remaining 364 days ahead. I doubt she believed it and I didn’t either except that if this day represents, as any day does, your life, your peculiarities and inclinations, it most often is going to be suggestive. And so I am not surprised that I am traveling on my birthday. My restlessness, insatiable craving for that glimpse of life elsewhere, has been with me for as long as I can remember and I see myself as being one day wheeled onto a flight to Paris, then wondering how I can get myself out of the metro system where not all stops provide access for the elderly and disabled.

I got upgraded on the flight from Miami, which is odd, because, as an Air France frequent flyer (they give benefits faster to American passengers) I am the lowest priority for Delta upgrades. On the flight down, I was number 26 out of 26 waitlisted for upgrades and they only gave out two. But this time, I was number four and they gave out four and there you have it. Birthday luck. I wanted to thank the attendant and explain that I was especially appreciative because it’s my birthday, but that felt like I was asking for something – perhaps a rendition of a Happy Birthday chorus and so I said nothing. But I smiled gratefully at the free cereal and tea with lemon.

By a stroke of great fortune both my daughters and their guys are able to join Ed and me for dinner tonight. So we’ll be a table of six and I think that’s pretty close to those tables in Italy where people casually leaned over each other and put an arm around the shoulder of their neighbor.

I have hopes for myself for the year ahead. To be less discouraged at the end of long work days. To take that smile from tonight’s dinner table and, as Ed would say, keep it going. As if every day was indeed my birthday.

Readers, Ocean friends -- I want to thank you so much for the good wishes variously sent on this day, on all days actually. I truly value each kind word, each greeting and thoughtful message from you.

So, fifty-nine today. Pretty good for a person who got stuck in some tricky situations early in life and almost didn’t make it past four months.

photo taken by a stranger, on April 20