bright and beautiful

 Perhaps I’ve neglected to say this and so if you’re not from these parts, you wouldn’t know – we are in a spin of the most beautiful days you could imagine. For this reason alone, I’m glad we did not go to South Dakota (though I suspect that there, too, the weather has been tremendously great... we tend to imitate what South Dakota has already done).

You dream about days like this – where the night is cool and the day starts out cool, so that you wear a sweater and wait for the magic moment when you can let it go. The sun is brilliant, the sky is brilliant – it’s all brilliant. There are no bugs, the breeze is potent but not overbearing, I mean, it’s what we crave the 364 days of the year that are not this.

Of course, it hardly matters. I am on a writing roll. I wake up at night and think of ways to improve sentences and when I get up, I don’t even bother with the delightful little breakfast on the porch thing, I slop the cereal and the fruit into the bowl and I sit down on the couch and get to it. With pillows to support my aching back, because – did I tell you? I threw out my back a couple of days ago and things haven’t been the same since. Especially things that require me to be still and in an upright position.

I took (lackadaisically) a handful of photos today, knowing damn well that the moment would come where I have to post and if there are no photos and no great events or thoughts of events then it all gets mighty dicey at 11 pm, when the Cinderella hour is nearing and Ocean draws a blank.

I was helped by a short venture to town (for groceries: I know things are bad when there’s no milk for Isis, or for my morning coffee and there is only one egg for the bailout dinner should we be needing a bailout dinner). Once downtown, it’s easy to zip to the Union by the lake and to look out at the boats and admire it all and there you have it – a photo that, at the very least, shows off this most exhilarating day.

You’ll think that there should be some dinner photos too? Well, alright, but it’s nothing to hold your breath for. Take-out Chinese.

We did play tennis (as I said – no day shall pass without some movement in it) and after dinner, Ed climbed the ladder and painted a few more inches of trim...

...and I think I’ll end with that. Because I can think of those pedantic types who would just up and paint the whole house in one season. Bu Ed didn’t do that. We left the last bit for this year and he’s dragging it out ‘til the last minute. As if it weren’t a chore at all. As if painting trim (or snipping beetles off of rose bushes, or any number of things we do here, at the farmette) is the very best way to spend the very best evening of this summer season. And maybe it is. Maybe it is.

And really, I just cannot express how beautiful it is out there today.

writing, continued

Can you make do with a photo of an apple? From our “old orchard?” The one that typically delivers very many unappealing, untasty apples? But today, for a change, delivered this exceptional beaut?

No? Well, too bad. It was a gorgeous apple.

I so wanted to write that I put my computer out on the porch even before I readied our breakfast fruits and cereals. Nothing will stand in my way!

I worked. With breaks for the beetle hunt. (That's where Ed and I compete as to how many nasty beetles we can find and shake off into our soapy water solution, so that the roses can bloom and the bees can collect pollen and life can continue as we know it.)

And yeah, Ed brought over to the porch where I was working warmed tomato slices with cheese curds, damn it, too many, too many. I reminded him that when I write I hardly move and perhaps cheese curds are not well matched to those moments.

In the afternoon we motor biked to Paul’s and I worked there as well, except Paul cut his finger severely while chopping cilantro and so that was quite the distraction. Ed turned all solicitous which probably freaked Paul out as Ed is never the solicitous type when shit happens. (He just tallies forth, because, you know, it’s life and shit happens.)

We went to the Fitchburg market and the corn was good, so good that we bought a dozen ears and so now I have to shuck and trim and freeze all that corn. It will be worth it, come wintertime. Now, it’s just a thing to add to my list.

At the market, we also bought our weekly supply of cheese curds. It’s cool to watch kids come up and sample cheese curds. Imagine her sampling the first one, with that squeek that only a fresh curd can provide.

I admired the tomatoes. You can’t get me to get excited about tomatoes these days and yet...

We also bought a melon. Why not.

And on our way back, we played tennis because I cannot become sedentary, no matter what. And then – home. To our gardens, our foods, my writing.

life, as I know it

I’m sorry to be so... content, but I had such a good writing day today that everything else seems only marginally important.

In fact it was so excellent (hour wise) that in a burst of optimism I predicted (to myself and now to you) that I would have a credible draft to work with at the end of next summer. One year ahead of schedule.

So... what do I say here on Ocean, when I am completely in love with writing elsewhere? Here’s the thing: Ocean is at least (if not more) as important. So I present to you my day. On a terribly wonderfully busy writing day.

There are the pauses, as Ed and I hunt for beetles.

And we take a whole half hour break to go over to Shopko. We want to buy out (nearly all) their remaining miniature roses. There are only about a dozen left and, at about a buck a piece (90% off!) they are a steal. Mostly though, we feel bad that nobody wants them.

Too, in the evening, I had to water again. The new acquisitions, not yet planted...

...and the stuff already in the ground. Isis watched. He’s quite adept at avoiding the spray from the hose.

In the evening, Ed biked and I cooked. We’re beyond the easy path, where I freeze garden tomatoes and use the remains for salad. We have too much. Time to get cooking. Big pot items like chili. And tomato soup. And tomato anything.

Today, it was time for tomatoes and lentils. Good for the next two days. In case I have another splendid writing day and can't think about cooking.

road trips and plums

A commenter, half wishing I had taken that trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota,  writes – A road trip ... I love that. That is my favorite thing... Well there you have it. The great cultural divide. This is why I know that I will always live on the margins of this society. Passport issued by the Dept of State notwithstanding, I’m not 100% of here.

I’ll tell you, no Pole from my generation ever, ever said – a road trip... I love that. Oh, sure, Poles, even in the years of my childhood, traveled by car. To get somewhere cheaply. Pack in as many as you can, along with skis and beach towels (maybe not for the same trip) and head out. But the joy is in finally unloading and locking up the trunk until the return home.

I tried to be one of you, I did. When I came back to America, as a student, I got right to the classifieds and looked for a used car. And I found one. An old VW bug in Brooklyn. Never mind that I lived in Manhattan and merely finding parking daily would be a headache beyond the imaginable. The car looked like the parts barely stuck together. You want it? The guy asked. I got scared. No...

Much earlier, my parents had planned the ultimate road trip. My sister and I found our place in the vinyl backseat of their Chevy Impala (this was during my first stay in America, when I was just a kid). We roadtripped our way from NY to LA and back again. My father smoked heady Camels up front in the driver's seat, my mother nudged him occasionally to slow down and I busied myself studying the AAA road book, looking at listings of motels we couldn’t afford.
This one has a swimming pool! 
No.

In Las Vegas someone ran a light (I ain’t tellin’) and there was a crash and though no one was hurt, we had to stay in place until the Impala got a new body. So when I think of road trips, I think, too, of slot machines and my poor mom trying to find things to do with two small kids in Las Vegas, in the hot summer of 1963. Can we see Summer Magic again in the movies? Sigh... Alright. Just one more time.

As an adult, I’ve roadtripped to the east coast and back so many dozens of times, I haven’t the stamina to do an accurate tally. The last time was with Ed, three years ago in his pickup truck and I swore I would never do that again. It wasn’t until we reached North Caroline that we were able to get the smell of mice out of the vents.

Road trip... Diners, picnics, gas stations where the attendant spits on the cloth and wipes your windshield and wishes you a good trip – I know you all long for this in the same way that you long for your mac and cheese and your apple pie, but I’m not with you on that one. That ribbon of highway for me is no vision of great beauty. I’d rather be above, moving quickly, or in a train car, with someone else navigating.

Even though I think, before I slip into some permanent coma of old age, I will probably do it again, with Ed. But I wont necessarily like it.

In other news:

Remember this day for me, will you please? It started cool. A light sweater was called for on the porch, you know, for breakfast – with summer fruits and Languedoc honey (I know we have good honey in Wisconsin, I know... the time will come for it). And Isis and Ed.

And then it’s not cool anymore and I roll up shorts and take off the sweater and go to our front patch of herbs (once  the place for our peas and lettuces and strawberries – mostly lost to wild animals feeding off the farmette) and add the small roses we loaded into the red donkey just yesterday. (Say what? Red donkey? Well, I finally stuck on the Catalan donkey to the trunk of the bumper-less Ford and so now it is my 'donkey car' – a fitting name for any number of reasons.)

Remember this day when we didn’t quite play tennis, but we made it to Paul's café and Ed did paint some more boards and I wrote brief paragraphs and the sky went from bright blue to gently cloudy, like a thermostat controlling the heat out there so that it felt just right all day long.

As I wrote on the porch, Ed brought me warmed tomato slices with melted curds again...

...and I said no, I can’t, I shouldn’t, take them away, but he put the plate down and soon I took one and then another and another and it was all so fresh and terribly honest.

Remind me of it when I complain at any time about less perfect days with too much work and bad weather. Tell me then that no one person can hog the plums of life all at the same time.

Today, though, was a plum. Soft and slow-paced and very kind.

When night fell, or, in the minutes just before, I sat out on the porch and watched fireflies and bats do their thing.

still life

It is remarkable how quiet the days can be in the summer and how terribly full they become after Labor Day.

Ed has a morning meeting and so I eat breakfast alone. Tomatoes! I need to attend to them: freeze some, put aside another set. Amazing how odd their shapes become as they grow!

Outside, the skies are gray. It may be raining again. I know it was drizzling when Isis came in in the middle of the night. Twice.

Wipe him down, please!

Yeah, okay, sure... what?

Rain. A good thing for the farmers around us.

 

I take papers to campus, dump them in my office and come back to an afternoon of errands with Ed. These are charming little escapades into the terrible world of big box stores. He drags me to Shopko because miniature planting roses are going for $1.29 each. It’s such a sweet gesture, even as in August, I’m all planted out. I bought my girlfriend roses, he tells the barista at Paul’s later.

Not for me! For your farmette!

No, for you.

Well alright. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear it. A note of sentimentality. But you have to really listen for it. 

I ask – do you want to eat dinner on the porch? Chicken brats, corn, a salad of garden tomatoes.

We play with my camera. I try to catch him when he’s not making gestures that don’t belong on a mellow blog. It’s not easy.

We move toward dusk calmly, happily, without reservations. And with chiken brats and tomatoes from the garden.

finding your way

A day or two ago: you want to go hiking and camping in the Black Hills?

Maybe.

(He continues to paint the house.)

Breakfast. You'll see the same images of a morning meal on the porch, though today Ed picks tomatoes and so we have those, too, to admire.

If you hear a note of desperation in that first question, you’re spot on. As August moves into its second half, I know my free days are very numbered. In the past, we’ve done a number of North American adventures in the summer. But this year a case could be made for just staying home. The weather is finally near perfect, we have almost no bugs (even as farmers down the road are having a hell of a time fighting them off; we rack our brains trying to understand what we’re doing right for two years in a row now and in the end, we figure it’s like the economy: too complicated for anyone to really understand and reliably manipulate into the future). 

Ed tells me – the tomatoes are ripening, your flowers are blooming, home is good now.

And yet, the man loves wilderness camping. I can sense the tug. Sill, I recoil once I figure out the driving time. Over thirteen hours each way on the highways. Many people have issues with flying. I have issues with spending the best part of any one day in a small box moving along a ribbon of asphalt.

We could listen to stuff. Make it fun.

So we should go?

Maybe not... it’s so nice here. Unless you want to camp?

Can we do two nights in a motel?

There’s no point in driving that far if we then spend time in a motel.

I do not see it that way. In an inspired flurry of morning activity, I had found a cheap cabin and in a surge of optimism, I booked a room. After hearing Ed's perspective, I unbook it and close all Internet tabs with promising South Dakota hiking trails. How is it that sometimes, Ed and I are so very compatible in our travel dreams and images. At other times, we are fermented in our own idiosyncratic preferences.

And so this too becomes a trip not taken.

Earlier, he had said – pick a place for dinner. Any place. I had noted that I’d been cooking daily, pretty much nonstop since our return from Europe. The man is asking me out on a date. I go for the whole banana: with a movie before that? (He knows that means a romantic comedy.) Okay, with a movie before that.

We eat at Lombardino’s, one of Madison’s good Italian places (by good, I mean that freshness matters to them).

And before, we see the movie Ruby Sparks. It’s a lovely film. And maybe you're thinking -- eh, it's not relevant to my bag of issues and foibles. Oh now, don't dismiss it that quickly. Will you agree that it is ever so wistfully sweet in suggesting that somewhere in the tangled mess that is life, you can find a good way to live with a person who is... very different than who you are and that that difference may be a good thing?

At dinner, we have the most wonderful pasta with seafoods...

...and at home I watch the end of the Olympics and I sob at the beautiful fiction that allowed us, for two weeks, to think of the world as a safe and caring place where good effort is enough to give you a chance to be who you want to be.



nasturtium from the garden

pics

May I just leave you with a few photos today? It's the kind of day where you don't need much more.

Breakfast. Fruits, yes, but mostly, it's about blueberries. In my mind, all that blueberry stuff is perfectly summerlike. Delightfully so.

Next stop – my daughter’s house. 

 

It's partway between the farmhouse and the downtown market. So I stop at her place, unload my bike and we finish the trip together, on bikes.

At the market – let’s look at the carrots and the flower sellers. Why? No reason. The colors are good.

After, my girl and I bike the twenty mile loop that takes us through prairie fields...

...and it is not terribly unusual to come across deer once you leave the city confines. Here’s a mommy deer with her young ones (or so we guess).

...and eventually we’re back in Madison, then in her place. I leave her there, returning to the farmhouse by myself.

Let's admire the new blooms that never ever show off their stuff before mid-August.

...and the old ones too, which would have to be the potted pansies that I put in... when, in March? Maybe April? They should have wilted and died once the season turned up the thermostat, but they’re still holding their heads high and I am so proud of their effort!

The day doesn’t end with a review of blooms. Ed and I play tennis, I spend hours on watering again, all that. But let me leave you with the old standby -- our farmhouse. This where I open the door and walk inside and think -- home. I'm home. This is where I exhale.

making noise

The middle of the night. It sounds like someone is rolling rocks across the wooden floor upstairs. Ed!

What? Go to sleep.

There’s some animal in this room!

Go to sleep.

Probably under the bed! I have never ever had the fear that there are monsters under my bed, but this time, I am convinced that we’re not alone up there: with us, there’s something with big claws. It’s not fast moving, but it is loud!

Please look under the bed!
No. Go to sleep. Probably Isis. Exploring.

No! Isis is right at this second standing in the doorway looking at us and wondering about the fuss.

Turn off the light.

My turn to say no. The “thing” hasn’t attacked Isis so I suppose I’m safe to look. I imagine gashes on my faces as the “thing” surely will lunge if I get too close. Ever so tentatively, keeping my hands off of the floor, I look down, below the bed.

Nothing.

Now will you please turn off the light?
I do, but the noise comes back. Okay, so it’s not under the bed. It’s in the wall, the attic, somewhere where there are boulders to roll around with claws.

How did it get in?
Through an opening. Ed can be very helpful, but not when you display anxiety about animals in the farmhouse in the middle of the night.

Eventually, the animal settles and we do too, but there are many hours in between and we spend them discussing houses, basements, attics – a whole “this old house” episode’s worth of talk, between 2 and 4 in the morning.

Friday. I wake to a reminder that the next season is fall. The day is crisp. Long pants weather. First time since we’ve returned from Europe. Do I like this return to cool? Do I? Well now, it’s not as if I get to decide.

farmer Lee, picking sunflowers for the market tomorrow

I go to my office for Part I of the annual great cleaning project. Today I throw away as much as possible. Thousands of pages of exams, papers, lectures for the shredder. Anything with dust on it. Out it goes. I have a small office and this forces choices. As I wheel my old chair from one end of the little room to the next, I think – this is a hell of a dysfunctional chair. It has no support. It is wobbly. I bought it, used, before I was even employed at the Law School (so more than two dozen years ago) and I took it with me to my office in part because I didn’t know what else to do with it. And it has stayed.

I’d grown jealous at seeing the proliferation of chairs that are actually kind to your back, chairs that can be adjusted this way and that and suddenly I think – I’m getting old. The back is to be protected. And so I ask the powers that be:

May I please have an office chair?

Instantly: Yes, of course.

That simple! For twenty years it never struck me that I could just ask!

Suddenly I am excited about the space on the bookshelf for the new semester, about the prospect of a functioning chair, about the coming of fall. For a little while, I accept the sudden slap and shake, telling me that a 'summer off' is just that – a 'summer off.' One season out of four.

In the late afternoon we resume our (suddenly precious) summer routines. At Paul’s café  I write and Ed naps.

rain and what follows

You need rain to remind you how good sunshine can be. (I know, you need it for other reasons too, but I’m taking the position of a person living on a mostly unproductive farm, so it’s all about how the weather affects us and our handful of growing things.) It’s our second day of rain. I write the manuscript during rainy days, but it’s a forced write. I sigh and sit down because going outside when it’s raining is pointless.

So I write. And I make progress and I’m thinking that these are the last writing days for me this year and maybe that’s a good thing because maybe I am just a summer season writer. And maybe that’s deliberate, so that I never have to release anything into the public domain, or at least not until I’m good and dead and I’ll avoid the whole people knocking on your door thing, telling you – it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like what you wrote at all.

When you blog, you make many friends and you lose a few, but when you write and release a whole book of material all at once, I should think that you make very few friends and create a pool of disappointment so deep that perhaps you never quite recover.

So maybe I think about that when I choose, on sunny days, to step outside and work in the garden rather than working on my book.

But, today there was no garden work. Yes, there was breakfast on the porch...

...and a quick flower viewing – before the rain...

...and during a pause...

...and that was it.

Having stocked the fridge with so much food last week, I felt it wrong to suggest a trip to the grocer’s again, but in fact we’ve eaten the last leftover sandwich, the milk supply is low and the fruit – well, our hold looks like something we would have at the tail end of  winter season. Tomorrow. I'll restock tomorrow.

We do make it to Paul’s, despite the rain...

...and we go to the farmers’ market, despite the rain...

...and we even pop in to see my daughter, despite the rain...

Tomorrow we’ll play tennis and I’ll prune and pick beetles off of roses and zap mosquitoes with the zapper and chase hornets out of the mailbox. Unless it rains.