minute by minute

The clock moves forward. At night, the rains come, during the day, the sun heats and somewhat dries the wet fields. The committee on the proposed ban on moped parking in the city of Madison meets and listens to the arguments on both sides (you can guess where I come down on this issue). I think about how most people aren’t affected by committee meetings and council decisions – you wont notice it, you wont care, but for us moped commuters, it’s a big push back into the car, with all that it entails.

Still, tick tock tick tock. 

The Fitchburg market is selling the usual, though less of it. One of my reliable vendors isn’t there for lack of product (though she promises to return later in the month with tomatoes and corn). Others show up, grateful that it’s *only* in the mid eighties outside. There is  corn, but some of it is dry at the tips while another vendor is warning that they’ve got worms at the tips  -- it’s as if this year, nature is going to get at you, no matter what.

Kids come to the market. Preschoolers, in bunches. These have cute clips in their hair. Maybe that was the morning activity: put cute clips in hair.

Slightly older kids pick up honey sticks which, I suppose is healthier than the Bit o’ Honey candy bar I coveted when I was their age.

Ed and I pause to play tennis. A bad game and then another. Tick, bounce, tock, bounce... Sorry! Out! We motorbike home. Tick, tock...

Another minute and another. I add pages to my book at home – pages! – and plant the rest of the tired bunch of flowers and herbs. Grueling work. The earth is hard and unforgiving. I tell myself – I should be grateful for having anything come out of it this year.

Isis comes up the brick path, tick, step, tock, all the way...

We eat a humble meal of eggs, scrambled with market mushrooms and a salad at the side. The crumbled cheese in it is local, the tomatoes are our own.

 

stealth

Secrets, in general

I don’t live in a world of secrets. That’s obvious. I blog and even though not everything makes it onto Ocean, most big ticket items do appear here. If a daughter’s getting married, you’re going to hear about it. Had Ed fallen off the ladder, I probably would have recorded it, broken bones and all.  

[Of course, very small items pop up on Ocean as well – I’m not shy about describing the unimportant, the small change, the kind of stuff you’d once find in a 5 and 10 – colorful, maybe, but ultimately fleeting. Tossable. The stuff we all have too much of.

Sometimes, it's not even colorful.]

Secrets, the specifics

This afternoon, Ed looks at me and I can’t tell whether there is a deeply felt disappointment or merely surprise when he says – I did not know about this addiction of yours. As if all other ones were duly noted and he’d come to terms with them but this, this was unexpected!

Well yes, it’s true. I find it hard (impossible) to pass by an opportunity to expand flower beds. He should have known. Indeed, he’s been stoking the fire, what with his spring habit of dumping wood chips all over the farmette, ostensibly to kill grasses and weeds, but in my opinion – enticing me to deposit flowers in the newly created beds. He’s an enabler.

Today I went to get an extra clay pot and I came home with a plant or two and really, that would have been just fine except this is not good weather for planting things. And in truth, there were more than “a plant or two” in the car.

It’s hitting 100 degrees F again.

Stealthy habits

It’s not good weather for biking. In fact, let’s be honest – it’s not good weather for anything or anyone, except maybe the beetles that have taken to copulating in threesome configurations, especially during the hottest part of the afternoon. On our roses.

Still, we bike to Paul’s café even as I admit to Ed that I think I am drinking too much coffee and too much milk with it and...  gosh, why is this blog post suddenly all about my addictions?

Which brings me to the topic of spritzers. There is, I think, no better aperitif on a hot, hot summer evening than an Aperol spritzer (recipe discussed earlier, in March, from Italy), but there are few things as pathetic as sitting alone on the porch and watching plants wilt, with an Aperol spritzer on the side. Ed would normally join me in the theatrical production of “While the Plants Wilt” but he bikes Wednesday nights and so here I am, tossing the idea of throwing together the bubbly and the ice and the orange and the Aperol, wondering if there is anything that I can do to help the flowers make it through yet another blistering summer hot spell.

No, no spritzer. Can I settle for cauliflower, eggs and tomato?

 

In the meantime, Isis moves quietly outside, so quietly that he can’t even make the movement sensor sound the chimes on his approach to our door. A dragon fly buzzes past and the darn thing chimes, but Isis is a cat of stealth when he moves about the property. Of utter secretive silence.

peaches and tomtoes

Can I interest you in photos of growing things?

Our most wonderful and exciting hour was actually an early one: right after breakfast (Ed asks – can we eat inside? The fruit bowl is so pretty here...)

(The fruits and tomatoes are a 50 - 50 mix of store bought and from the garden.)

A storm had passed through and the world is damp – a rare feeling these days. (If you stuck your finger in the soil, you’d find that there wasn’t the needed sustained rainfall, but still, we’ll take the sprinkles. And the cooling clouds.)

Want to walk the property?

Of course I do. The three of us set out. It’s always the three of us – when we walk the land, Isis tags along. Even today, when the grasses are wet. True, he gets a hoist up if he asks for it.

We examine the crop of our farmer, Lee, out back. Some of the plantings are damaged, others look good and strong. (They’re cucumbers, right? I’m used to seeing cucumbers crawl along the ground.)

And we look over our new orchard. We’re losing one of the cherries to some unrecognizable disease and another tree is just a stick, having given up all leaves to a hungry deer, but the rest (dozen or so) appear fine.

And the tomatoes! Oh my, unless some untoward calamity takes our crop away, we’ll have a load to freeze for sure. For me, it is the most useful vegetable to preserve for the winter. (Nearly) every soup can incorporate tomatoes and the ones in stores have been really poor, even now, during the high season.

Ed asks – why did we plant so many tiny ones? Useless for freezing!
But great for salads! From now until frost, no dish of greens will be without these!

We take another peek at the peaches too. They are almost ripe and we’re tempted to pull the whole crop off because the beetles, those very same beetles that are attacking our roses, are burrowing into the fruit. And they’re harder to shake off into soapy water here. If we pick all the peaches now, that'll mean peach ice cream, peach cakes and peach on oatmeal every day. (This is the one fruit that I don’t like to freeze. Defrosted peaches are... yukky.)

Later in the morning, I replant various herbs and Ed, rather optimistically, empties out the remaining peas from a seed pack, counting on a harvest 60 days from now. That would put us at the end of September. Remember September in Wisconsin? There may be night frost by then!

Night frost... If there is anything that’ll put fire under my typing fingers it’s the idea that we are almost at the heels of fall.

And yet I linger outside, chasing down beetles, potting dahlias for a daughter who needs dahlias, snipping off spent heads of coreopsis and the fleeting lilies.

A commenter wrote a few days back -- Time in the garden is time well spent. One of my favorite things about it, besides promoting beauty, is that it's a chance to let my mind wander and be productive at the same time. That’s really so exactly correct! We have the heat, but we haven’t the bugs this year.  And so we can live outside. [I'm referring to the absence of mosquitoes... Ed chased wasps off the truck yesterday and with great ire, they relocated to my red Escort: first around the door handle then, after Ed put an old quilt over that, onto the wheel base... we offer them numerous places for repose and they continue to favor our wrecks of cars.]

It is a summer when I'm not pushing for us to go up north (they had the rains and, therefore, the bugs) or west. Not to hike, not to kayak, not to camp. It is quite wonderful just to walk the land and comment on how the tomatoes are getting along.

fixing things

On some days I think -- this is it, a perfect rendition of how a summer day should unfold. Other days? Well, they're like a checkerboard cookie: they have their chocolate and then too, their indifferently pale squares.  

 Much of the day was straightforward. My daughter is moving. I'm known to do miracles with shelf paper (meaning, I put it on shelves methodically, without throwing it on anything or anyone within eyesight, despite deep frustrations that always arise when attending to this dreary task ) and so I am charged with the job of putting it on the shelves of her new residence. That's the good set of chocolate squares. Providing help to a daughter is up there with doing good in this world.

Ed’s at her place too, with his highest possible ladder replacing lightbulbs. (I have to ask: who thinks of putting lamps in places that are out of reach of the ordinary mortal?)

All good, all wonderful.

And here are  few more good squares: friends are at the farmhouse for dinner -- the kind of friends that you love to cook for because they are so very forgiving as to timing and presentation -- and this is the perfect opportunity to make a summer meal: salmon with blueberries and shallot, salad with cucumbers and tomato, roastedcorn. And plum honey ice cream.

Who can not love plum honey ice cream?!

And so dinner is on the good side of the square pattern as well.

On the other side? Well, for one thing, I'm late with posting. And Ed and I continue to have the conversation about what role we play in the game of life. On chocolate days, you could think of this as a wonderful engagement in life's challenges. In the less delectable times, you might consider it a tiring discourse that has no good answers, showcasing our most glaring differences in ways that benefit no one. 

And, don't forget that it hit 99 degrees this afternoon and I wasn't ready for it so most of newly planted green stuff wilted.

Thank God for daughters, friends and plum honey ice cream.





And Ed and me. Thank God for that funky crazy world that he and I inhabit. Together.  With all our dissonances and chocolate squares as well.

farm

I suppose some could say that my constant reference to the farm (or 'farmette,' because it’s a small amount of land) is misleading. Ed and I, after all, do not farm. I remember when I lived with my grandparents in a village in Poland: it was surrounded by farmland, but there, too, I didn’t live on a working farm. My grandma could whack off the head of a chicken and pluck the bird clean for dinner. She’d grow vegetables and my grandpa would tend to fruit trees – but still, they did not make a living off their land.

We are like that. Okay – I wont behead a chicken for Sunday supper, but we try our best at growing fruits and veggies, there is land and, well, everyone around us farms.

So I’ll stay with my statement – we live on a (once working) farm.

It took me many years to decide that this shift toward farmette living would be a good idea. I know that more acres means more land to tend to. I didn’t want it to consume my free time.

When I agreed to move out here, I promised myself I'd concentrate on caring for the land right by the farmhouse. The rest? Forget it. I'll turn my head and look the other way. There’s too much to do in life...

So here I am at the farmette and I am so sucked into every acre and it takes so many of my waking hours – the beetle chasing, the watering, the planting, digging, worrying – where has all my free time gone???

But there is something to add  here (and perhaps I knew all along that this would be the case): I love it. I love being preoccupied with it, I love not being able to walk from point A to point B without a three hour pause to deadhead, straighten, improve, or maybe not improve – maybe I don’t really know what I’m doing, hell, I may have country blood, but it's Polish country, not of the Midwest at all and certainly Ed's roots aren't from here either, but we love it, I love it, yes, it's so true -- I love it all.

Ed joins me most every time I work outdoors. He’ll heave away prickly canes and chop and dig and sometimes he’ll just work on the car, the old Escort and oftentimes Isis will be there as well, walkin' around as if he owned the place. Which he sort of does...

So, living on the farmette digs into my writing time. Is that okay? Is it???

Yes, quite okay. I've done ten things at once before, I can do ten things at once henceforth.

In the morning, we clip, shake, contemplate what should be next for the veggie bed (that turned out to be a troubled veggie bed).

As I snip away at dried rose bushes, I notice hovering wasps.

Ed, take a look at your pick-up. Don’t even try to fill it with gas.

Let it be. They always find a spot on the truck for a nest. They’ll just make a new one elsewhere if we knock this one down.

Later, at Farm and Fleet, we pick up a small shovel because the ancient one finally snapped at the handle. And red duct tape: the one that acted as the “fender” on the Ford Escort has succumbed to the elements. It needs to be replaced. And a few plants.

Farm and Fleet is a scant few miles from us. We take the usual route to get there. Past fields, past fields, past more fields. But this time, the fields are hardly empty.

A flock of sandhill cranes (with wild turkeys keeping tabs on things in the rear). When they see us...



 



... one starts the call and soon they walk briskly, away, eventually breaking into flight, across fields of ripening corn.

A quarter of a mile further, we pass the pig farm that puts bacon on the table at select places in the Midwest.

The pigs here look huge and not too entertained by their surroundings. You stop craving bacon when you pass their pen.

And less than a mile later, we curve down a road and come across this...

I think at first it's one deer, but it's not.

They see me. A pause and a quiet walk away, into the fields of tall prairie grasses.

When we finish our errands at Farm and Fleet, we take the off-highway road back. And I'm surprised to see a farmer's market along the way (the Monona Market, for those who live in these parts). I'm all stocked up with fruits and vegetables, but I do pick up herbs -- a stop gap filler for our veggie plot. We stroll past one vendor and another and we come across this kid selling things made out of duct tape.





Funny, we were just reading about people who make a hobby of duck tape designs. I grin at the display. I want to encourage the kid, but I just don't need a duct tape wallet right now. Maybe next time.

A blue grass player sings to the side...


 


... further down, a vendor talks up her project of soaps, crafted from goats' milk...

I think surely my own project will somehow move ahead, despite all the distractions which, truthfully, aren't bothersome distractions at all. They are the eloquent parts of the everyday.


And because it's Sunday, my girl and her guy come over for dinner, up the brick walkway to the farmhouse...


 


... and we sit around the table and talk about stories we've read, foods we've eaten...

growing things

With adult children, sometimes days and weeks pass and I can't really tell you where they are and what they're doing.  Other times, one or both will be in and around my world and I get to feel their energy and zest up close, as if they still lived with me and woke up to the same meals that I do.  

This week-end the older girl and I did some usual and unusual spins together: first, around the market. Yes, that's common for us. (How can you not buy from the farming families in these days of such stressful growing conditions?)

And, my girl and I biked around the city, completing that twenty mile loop that we love to do every now and then.

She tells me we somehow always hit this bike trail in prime blooming time - when the prairie flowers are at their best. Maybe. It surely looks as if this year, we come at a time of prairie magic. (Can you tell that I don't always pause to take a photo?)

I leave her downtown and continue along the path that now borders one of our big lakes. Where fishermen still reel in a good number of... bluegill (that's a guess on my part) on a hot summer afternoon.

And then it's back to the prairie fields for me. With the gay feather and the black eyed girls and the lacy Queen Ann.

And speaking of blooms, this, too, is the day for me to continue to mend and fix the flower beds at the farmette. While Ed patiently works on repairing my car  (Ed, please be careful! That thing looks like it's about to roll on top of you! Mmmm, yes gorgeous...), I patiently repair the heat damage in the yard. Oh, I can't get it to be as it would have been without the endless blast of hot, hot air, but I can do a lot to make it feel abundantly lush again. Untamed, verdant. Like this:

So that it is once again a pleasure to walk up the brick path...

Or to step back and regard the whole farmhouse face on, in the last warm rays of the setting sun.

It's very late when we finally throw up the shovels, hoses and (in Ed's case) wrenches. Very late.

the quiet day

We’ve been shaking beetles from the wild roses that grow so abundantly here at the farmette (well, they grow abundantly when there isn’t a drought and a heat wave). Down they go (if our aim is good) into a dish with soapy water.

Typically Ed leaves bugs, all bugs, even annoying wasps alone. But the beetles can make a ghost out of a bush pretty quickly and they have the audacity to do it in pairs, often seeming to be copulating at the same time that they’re devouring the newest growth. Sort of like having your cake and eating it during sex. Enough already! Leave these stressed plants alone. Plop. Another pair hits the soapy water. Ed says we’re exercising the Amygdala of our brain. Fine. So long as we're flicking off beetles.

So many of our plants rebounded with the rains and cooling temps. Unfortunately the meteorological down swing lasted less than one day. We’re picking up the degrees now quickly, too quickly. As fast as as plopping beetles into what is becoming beetle porridge. Last I checked it was 83 outside. Tomorrow it’s supposed to go to 96. By Monday – 103. Short-lived joy. The drought continues.

And still, it was a beautiful morning. The kind with blue skies and blue dishes with blueberries on the porch table, which has a blue tablecloth.

Like the rest of the country, I read the news of the day and of course, that surely puts a stop to those beautiful feelings of peace and quiet and summertime contenment. It’s impossible to be happy when others are so deeply hurting. Ed reminds me that we are a less violent society than we were decades or centuries ago and I know he is correct and yet on days like this, it’s hard to believe that this is the case.

We walk to inspect the tomatoes out back. Isis joins us in what is a favorite stroll for us. Bounty indeed. They’re doing well back there. Watching tomatoes grow is very reassuring.

(The peaches are coming along as well. Here, take a look.)

Today I also replace spent flowers along the brick walk leading to our door. The lilies bloomed and withered in the heat (they’ll be back next year) and they have been further insulted by a deer who, in our absence, took to nesting in their midst, as if it were merely a bed created for the buck’s pleasure.

At Johannsen’s Greenhouse most everything is sold and gone and what's left is discounted. That’s good. A few sunflowers, zinnias, sweet smelling alyssum – things that will not shrivel against the bracing heat.

We bike to Paul’s again. There,  Ed sleeps, I write and after, on our way back, we hit the tennis courts again. I neglected to take my tennies (well, hiking shoes) and so I play in sandals which is both amusing and awkward. But I’m getting better or Ed is getting worse or maybe we’re just getting to be slightly more like the other, which doesn’t surprise me at all. Eating same foods, moving along similar paths does that to people.

In the evening I reheat our chicken soup and I make an Aperol spritz – with a slice of orange for added zest.

There’s a reason to  read and write about these trivial elements of the everyday: they are what makes life grand. Better than grand.

Sigh...

...with you tonight

(Morning. Writing on the porch.)

Yesterday I was taking out groceries at the checkout counter in Whole Foods. I lined up next to a  certain cashier – one that I like. He’s my age, with a pony tail of graying hair. He’s not too friendly and I like that too. No bubbles and smiles. It’s grim when you watch the totals add up at the register. Not a time for small talk and chuckles.

Whole Foods lets those who work there pick their music and this time I recognize the song playing over their sound system. I sing it to myself as I put out my groceries. Peaches, carrots, lettuce... just hold me close, don’t ever let me go... chicken, cherries, cheese...please go all the way, it feels so right...

Singing that out loud is almost like acting out an orgasm at Katz’ Deli in the "When Harry Meets Sally" movie. It’s a very suggestive little ditty.

But this is not what flashes through my mind. I'm thinking, instead, about days when this played on the radio, again and again. It was July 1972 and I was a nanny in New York. I’d finally gotten my driver’s license -- having taken a lesson or two from one of those outfits that advertised on the back of a book of matches.  American highways were new and exhilarating and somewhat frightening to me, but my charge had lessons and it had to be done and very quickly it became second nature to turn on the radio, roll down the windows and join the stream of cars, while the songs played on.

The seller at Whole Foods comments – you know the lyrics, but do you remember who sang it?

I don’t.

Think of a fruit. One that you didn’t buy.

Raspberries!
You got it.

Those kinds of inserts into a day – a song maybe, a fragrance sometimes – send me spinning. It’s not hard then to put yourself into your nineteen year old head. Sometimes when I think about things I did then, I’ll shake my head and mumble  – what was I thinking! At other times, like this time, I just smile gently at the recollection. 

When you’re nineteen you pretty much believe you’ve got a lot of life figured out already. Oh, there are the questions – will I marry, who will I marry, where will I live, what will my job be, will I travel? Will I travel?? But the basics – who you are and how you relate to the world – that stuff seems clear (before it becomes cloudy again, but that comes later – a life’s surprise: you never really know who you are until the next set of issues comes along, and then the next one after that, and so on).

So here I am in line, thinking back to the music played loud in the car – a yellow convertible no less – my charge’s mom liked to zip around in it during the summer months – and I remember the pleasure of hearing these songs and, too, the deep sadness, because so far, love for me had been a big waste of time. At nineteen, I was quickly losing hope. It feels so right, being with you tonight...That was someone else's lyric, not mine.

Ed and I play tennis this afternoon. (Here we are, biking to the courts.)

 

It’s been a while and so of course I’m terrible and he’s okay, but the good side to this inequality is that I chase more balls and get the better workout.

Other highlights – I’m downtown this evening, eating dinner with my daughter (the one who is getting married in exactly two months and three days).

The skies are gray all day and it’s cool outside. I miss the heat even as I know that this is not a sentiment shared by most here in the Midwest. Most certainly, I’m thrilled that the change in weather is an uplift for the farmers.

Hi Lee! Rain! -- I shout as I pedal past our resident farmer.

Yes! Yes!!

That says it all.