cat on a hot steel roof

Hello, morning. Yes, from any vantage point, it is a beautiful time of day. A real show stopper.

But I cannot dawdle today. I have before me a grand swing through town, with many things to accomplish there.

The best part is the first stop – at the Arboretum, for a walk (a run?) with my daughter.

The worst part is everything else. When you don’t go in to the city very often, your checklist grows. And grows. Exchange this, pick up that, and that, stop over here, do that. Bleh!

I remember sitting at a café in Sorede (very southern tip of France) and thinking – man, that guy who’s making food deliveries here sure seems to enjoy his work! Going from one place to the next, carting in boxes of onions and carrots with stems still on them – he’s virtually singing as he unloads the truck. What’s so great about stop and go errands? Stop, start, stop, start – it’s numbing!

In the Sorede scene, I see the pleasurable elements: it's not just the unload, it's also the greeting, the pause for an espresso, a comment on this or the next thing, a salute to life.

My errands (after the lovely walk) have the stop and go but none of the warm elements that would give them meaning and vitality. Stop, get out, purchase, pick up, no greeting offered, none received. Onto the next one.

And then, finally, I’m done. Pulling into the driveway of the farmette, I exhale. Home.

In the evening we are out planting again. Tomatoes. Eight more go in, shade, no shade, so what – so they’ll produce a dozen fruits each instead of two dozen. Do the math! We have too many plants, too many seedlings, we should cross our fingers and hope for a small bounty!

And then we plant a flat of strawberries and they look so pretty and so oblivious to the fact that they’ll have to spend half the day in shade that we search the farmland for more berries (because there are indeed some old berries with new runners, smothered in weeds, needing a rescue) and we transplant those too and now we are satisfied because the peas are starting to climb, the lettuce leaves are almost ready, the tomatoes are perky and the strawberries – lovely to behold.

The bulk of our spring work is done. Orchard, flowers, veggies, berries – most everything is in place. (Except the tomatoes: dozens more of those... next year we’ll do less, Ed tells me, as if that helps us now.) Some of our plantings will thrive, others wont, we know that, we are not foolishly optimistic. But the stage is set. The new season begins. 

...make the garden grow

What a day, what a wonderfully bright, pungent with spring, beautiful, sunny day!

But we sleep in. At night, Isis was restless, Ed was tired after his bike ride and so I was the cat care person, down the stairs, up the stairs, coming Isis! Okay Isis! Ed was so deeply asleep that he almost didn’t wake to the loud crash of Isis being knocked off the bed by an overly generous sweep of a limb. Ed's limb. Isis knows to sleep on that side of the bed. I complain loudly when he wanders over.

But last night the cat fell off the bed and I felt sorry for him so I was a good caregiver. Coming Isis!

We ate a hurried breakfast. It’s a packed day for us. Tomorrow I pick up exams, but today I have a different agenda! 

 

Start putting in the tomatoes! (Two dozen today, many dozen more at another time)

...and plant the newly arrived variation on pink daylilies (goal: 24) and lavenders (goal: the entire 6).

The noon hour passes, the sun grows stronger.

Lee, our resident farmer, comes over to assess the land she’ll be planting. How is it? I ask her.

Lots of grass. She has a point. It will be several years before all the quack grass is tilled out of there.

What are you planting? - I ask.

Cucumbers! Big ones. Pickle cucumbers!

Ah.

She walks past our veggie plot. Her friend is with her and they have a rapid exchange in Hmong and there are small giggles mixed in as well and it doesn’t take much to understand that she is amused at our efforts. She looks up at the sky and shakes her head.

I know! Not enough sun.

You come pick my peas. No need to plant.

Too late. We're invested in our beds.

Revised count: planted today: 28 tomatoes,  20 daylilies, 6 lavenders and various miscellaneous cheapies acquired at a Shopko sale – not so much because the plants themselves were tempting, but because these commercially grown perennials look so bedraggled and listless that it’s like going to an animal shelter and saving a cat or dog from a fate far worse than coming home with you.

The sun has set, the birds have settled. We eat our summer supper, which so often is accompanied by a baguette from the Thursday market...

La Baguette

Ed asks me – do you ever finish planting?

And I answer truthfully – yes. When we stumble into summer I am done. For me, there is a time for work and a time for reaping the benefits of work. My interest in digging the land diminishes as the soil gets harder, dryer, less forgiving, when the failed plants can’t be revived, not this year anyway, when the bugs drive us nuts, when there are other ways to enjoy the heat of the day.

 But for now, we work. Everyone who cares about what the earth produces works now. Late into the evening, until the sun sets.

bright days

I leave my countrified existence and spend the day on campus. If you’re teaching faculty at our Law School, you’ll know why – we have a retreat today, a daylong conversation about where we’re heading and how best to get there. A productive discussion. These are challenging times for universities and professional schools within them.

But it does mean that all else has to be put on hold. For me, the “all else” is fairly inconsequential. I’m done with exam writing, I haven’t exams to grade yet. Limbo days. Suspended between what was before and what comes next.

...With this one day retreat squashed in there on a bright, puffy May day. Perfect for a bike ride to campus.

And now it’s evening at the farmette. Ed has left for his Wednesday bike ride, I’ve pulled a bunch of weeds and admired the lettuce growth (slow but sure) and, too, I’ve waved a broom at menacing chipmunks and paid homage to the dragon flies...

...all that and now I’m settled in for a night of wondering how I can ever love winter again when spring (especially as it begins its roll into summer) is so very perfect.

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.