inside outside

...or helter skelter. Or rush and release. Or back and forth. Call it what you will, the day had no structure, no consistency, no backbone to it.

Maybe it’s because it started too early. Lanky guys with cigarettes dangling, shows up with the MG&E truck at 7:15, ready to dump wood chips. Weird wood chips. More like pine needles and old moldy branches. But, we’ll take what we can get. The farmette is one big wood chip hill. I found my thrill on blueberry hill, piled with chips from the mill, on that blueberry hill.

Was this one of the earlier farmsteads in the area? I ask Ed at breakfast.

Maybe. It’s on a hill. Farmhouses were built on hills.

Why do you suppose?

Because the soil is better down below? Or, because there’s the view...

Right now, we haven’t much of a view. The trees are too tall.

In fact, I’m not sure our veggie garden is getting enough sunlight. In the winter, it looked like we would have more than six hours on the patch, but things change, trees fill out, shade takes over.

We can move the veggies out by the orchard in the future... Ed comments. But what would we do with this plot of land?

Grow flowers! – I say to him, knowing damn well that it’s the answer he’d like not to hear. Even today, I stopped by the nursery to pick up “oranges and lemons”  and “raspberry truffle.” You sure do like flowers – he shakes his head.

In the afternoon I go back to my school stuff. I have to. And that’s okay – these are good work demands. For a brief hour or two, I meet with dedicated students, at Paul’s. To answer questions about the semester's materials. In biking there and back, I note that the weedy but ever beautiful phlox is up and running.

Funny how sometimes you have to remember what's merely a weed and what's a beautiful flower.

In the evening, Ed takes me out to dinner.  At Sardine, for the happy hour special (oysters at 50%, glasses of wine at 50%, and then we share a plate of mussels).

We don’t let it end there. The sun is nearly set as, after dinner,  we walk along the road, toward the fields adjacent to the south, to the west... Ed talks to Lee, the woman who seems to single handedly cultivate the land here.
Will you be planting our acre? He asks.
It is not an acre. She’s right, it’s less than that. For what? She wants to know the cost involved.

For fruits and vegetables.
How many?
Just for us. She smiles. We shake hands, she drives off.

There is a beautiful sunset as we make our way across fields and marshes, dry now in this early season. I know, a photo would be appropriate. I did take out my phone and to snap one and then another, but they're not worth downloading here...

Not everything needs to be commemorated with a photo.

beds

But wait a minute – aren’t summers free from teaching supposed to have me make progress on my writing project (aka the book)?

Well yes, but I wont return to it until my exams are written and graded and that’s several weeks before me. My classes are not small.

In the meantime, Ed and I continue to work the land.

Four years ago, I created a flower bed by the path to the sheep shed.

Three years ago, I started work on the flower bed by the path to the farmhouse door.

Two years ago, we weeded and I planted the flower bed at the “front” of the farmhouse.

Last year we began work on the huge bed to the west.

And this year we’re at it again – besides the so far fantastically successful orchard, with our 13 trees and 11 blueberries, and besides the veggie patch out front, we’re adding a flower bed to the east.

For Ed, it’s not about creating beds. His goal is to cut back on the “lawn,” which is hardly a lawn – rather, a mixture of grasses and weeds. And so he whips...

 

...and he moves and removes boulders, old railroad ties...

 

...and he piles on the chips, taking free truckloads from anyone who is in the business of shredding trees. (Our latest contributor: Madison Gas & Electric.) Conventional wisdom has it that woodchips take away nitrogen from the soil, but we’ve had such tremendous success with shredded wood that Ed is convinced that the CW is too conventional and with not a lot of wisdom to it. There’s much to the process of wood chip decomposition, spore creation, etc etc, that is so complicated that it’s rather like trying to understand the economy – anyone’s guess is good until proven wrong.

The days of planting and tending are magnificent in May. By mid June, bugs start to be a nuisance, but for now, it’s just us and the butterflies. And Isis. 

He follows us as we lift and shovel and fill and occasionally Ed will say – he’s happy, he has a good life here and I agree and we both know that these comments are only in part about the cat. 

raining like cats and...

Waking up to thunder and a downpour. That’s okay, Sunday morning is farmhouse cleaning time. And though I’m not a fan of cleaning (who is...), I’m a fan of clean, so that when the place sparkles, I am happy.

This morning, therefore, I am made happy.

And then it’s a cat and mouse game. The rain stops. Outside, everything is wet, bountiful, saturated. (Ed tells me he has never seen the pear tree leaves so shiny, the fruits so plentiful...)





I spend a profitable hour planting and, too, seeding. The routine is that weeds come out, flowers go in and then lastly, seeds fill spaces that could benefit from, say, a burst of cosmos or a trail of nasturtium.

But there is another clap of thunder, followed by a downpour and I retreat indoors, hearing the message loud and clear – the Gods are angry! Quit running away and finish your paper work!

But I don’t finish because two hours later, it’s quiet again. The ground is too soggy to plant, so Ed and I attack weeds by the sheepshed. Selectively.  I long realized that if I am to be happy at the farmette, I have to look away from the jungle that grows by the barn and shed. We’ve brought most of the land under some semblance of order, but this one place – where raspberries are still galloping in random directions and creeping Charlie and burdock and every imaginable weed has set up residence, smothering any worthwhile plant in its path – this strip defies good intentions. 

There’s a small flower bed along the path to the shed -- one that I planted a few years back, and it has a gorgeous lavender bush and a Russian sage and a few random lilies and a dazzling cloud of golden coreopsis and I weeded them this afternoon...

 

...and Isis played with the pulled catnip, getting nice and high on the taste and smell of this heady plant, and it was rather a pleasant spell...

...and the rains stayed away, against all odds. I brought my peanut butter sandwich and cup of macchiato out to the picnic bench and we watched the chipmunk come out to assess what fine meals had been planted for his own consumption.

After, I had to retreat inside, to again pick up my work. But not before surveying the front of the house where, right now, lilies of the valley are growing in wild abandon. I clip some and stick them in an old olive oil bottle from Sorede. 

If you haven't sniffed on a lily of the valley stem lately, do so now. You may never recover, but you'll be better for it.

earthy thoughts

It is quite true that for the entire month of May, I am tempted to do nothing more here than recount the horrors of weeding.

Are they horrors though?

Ed tells me today that I should pay him what I would pay into a health club. What is it, he speculates -- $30 a month? His point is that he, by providing me with opportunities to throw myself at improving his land, has added years to my life. My retort is that my preparing for him fresh vegetables and grains daily, nay, several times each day, I add years to his life.

I was eating pounds of fresh tomatoes way before you started cooking for me.

That’s right, always remember those tomatoes. And the other days?

This is our conversation. On these essential points, it does not vary much.

Though sometimes, the back and forth comes at odd times. On good nights, we both have periods of wakefulness at the same (ungodly) hour. (On less synchronized nights, one sleeps while the other reads a computer perched on his belly; on worst possible nights, there's that, interspersed with cat comings and goings.) It is a good night. We are both fully awake at 2:35 a.m.and so we talk economics and politics and, in concluding that nothing is predictable nor, therefore, easy to manipulate, we eventually fall asleep.

I mention this because it is such a luxury to not worry about being tired the next day. 

Saturday. My daughter and I go to the downtown market. The big market. First time for me this year. What stands out? Let me limit it to two things: running into familiar faces – of vendors and friends...

...and, too, let’s not forget, it’s a spring market still. Before the fruits and veggies take charge, you have, in spring time, endlessly beautiful flowers.

Which brings me right back to the farmette. A day of planting. With a final run to the Flower Factory, to pick up coveted additional perennials.

Ed sits at the side and watches me fill the cart. He scratches his head, studies the tags, scratches his head again...

What, more? Are you sure?

I’m sure. I grin broadly. Buying plants, for me, is as satisfying as buying jewelry might be for another.

I add a few more.
In the scheme of things, it's not a large amount, but to Ed, paying for a flower always feels extravagant. For me, even in the toughest times, flowers have been on the table.

I continue searching, contemplating, imagining. Ed gets fidgety. He walks over to the sandbox. It's a good distraction for little ones and big Ed.

Finally, I’m done.

It’s early still. Three more hours of daylight left, three more hours of digging, moving, planting, until there is no more daylight left.

Late, very late, after reheated soup, after all’s put away, we watch a movie about an English neurosurgeon who does work, often on hopeless cases, in the Ukraine. A tough movie, not fitting perhaps for the most beautiful day of gardening, but, you can never get too soft, too complacent, too close to the feeling that you’re in some way deserving.  And so we watch.

And the day rolls into night and I’m thinking it’s time to start plugging elements of paper work into these slow moving days of working the earth. I need to finish off the tasks of the semesters. It's not summer yet. Can't be fooled. Not for more than a few days at a time.

dedicated to weed removal

A couple of observations: the lettuce is growing.  Slowly, but it’s getting’ there. Ed tells me we can pluck those baby leaves pretty soon now.

Second point (and after it I'll stop numbering): isn’t it interesting that we take out one thing and then, seconds later, put in something else? This is what we do: pluck out a weed, shovel in a different plant. Out, in, remove, replace. You could say that all my nonwork hours today were spent on the plucking side of the equation: the removal, the clearing.

Why? I have grander ideas on how I should spend my soon to be (after exam work) free time.

Here's one reason: Ed got up before dawn to create a new flower bed.

And I was up soon after, clearing it and so long as I was clearing it, I extended my great vacuuming hands and dug out weeds in neighboring patches. Like in this place – weedless, as of today.

(I appear to have forgotten that I could use gloves. My hands are raw from the hours of digging out roots.)

(Another side note: don't think that weeding is over and done with. You need only cast an evening glance toward the barn and the sheep shed to understand that there's lots more where that came from.)

We were to plant in the afternoon, but there wasn’t time. And so my hands ache, my back is sore and all we have to show for it is a truckload of weeds and nothing in their place.

Gardening is tough work. I sometimes wonder why I love it so.

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.