food

Friday. After breakfast (in the kitchen, because no sun pokes through this morning, not yet, not this early)






... I work at home. When there is, for a second, a ray of pale sunshine - I'm on it!






But very quickly, the clouds return. The farmed fields are gray and brown once more.






Let's see what's new at the farmhouse: well now, not only does the cat, Isis, have a litter box for his bathroom pleasures but we caved and brought in (from the shed) a step-and-dine for him so that he can enjoy his favorite kitty crunchies. (Okay, he doesn't really have a favorite. Ed buys whatever is cheap. If I'm with him, I nudge him up a grade, but it all looks junky to me -- sort of like Cap'n Crunch for your kids' breakfast.) What's step-and-dine, you ask? Well, it's this bowl with a cover. To eat, the cat has to step his paw on a lever and keep it there to prop the lid open. One reviewer once wrote -- it's a Mensa test for cats and mine failed! It seems that most fail, because step-and-dine is no longer in production. (German cats appear to be better at mastering the step and dine directive  because it seems you can still buy the cat dish there. Ed bought a used one off of E-bay some years back)

Isis, once a feral cat, has street smarts. He can dance circles around step-and-dine.

(I'd contribute a photo, but after step-and-dining, he has retired to his favorite place in the farmhouse -- upstairs, on the bed, my side.)

But I have other photos of other eating situations. Tonight, Ed and I went to a fundraiser for Fitchburg Fields -- a "teaching and sharing garden..."



 


...that right now uses a small plot of land halfway between our farmette and Paul's cafe for organic gardening, but has as a vision the creation of a far grander, larger sustainable farming community. Where? Well actually all around where we live at the farmette. (It's a very long term vision.)

In any case, Ed has always been supportive of their gardening efforts and so now here we are, at their Harvest Dinner (a vegetarian meal catered by the Underground Food Collective -- another group, near and dear to me, of dedicated food people).

(Oh, hold on, before we left, Isis came down and agreed to demonstrate his Mensa skills.)





Back to the dinner.

Because Madison is actually a small town (not by numbers, but measured by the likelihood of you knowing someone at some random event), I wasn't surprised to see at the Harvest Dinner this talented musician…





(Whose mother once taught my daughter viola.)

And even for this humble meal, I knew the Underground Food masters would do well by us.


 


The squash, the polenta, the salads… mmmmm






Ed and I snuck out before the presentations, the cajoling speeches, the movie clips. We know the plans, the people, we understand their sincerity, their vision.

Grand visions push you to do grand things. But it's the small things that set a tone for our everyday. We picked up a small thing: a jar of home made sauerkraut for the turkey brats we sometimes have for supper.

nuts

Ed asked me a day or so ago -- what is that?
What?
You know, what you say…
Oh, you mean Geeze Louise?
Yes, exactly.
It's just so appropriate to so many situations.
He stares at me, as if trying to figure out how any one person can have so many peculiar habits. Oftentimes he'll shrug and say -- what do you know -- you didn't grow up here (which is only partly true). But this time it's not as if he could attribute my repeated use of these words (such as they are) to my Polishness.  Geeze Louise is most definitely not a Polish expression.

Later, in class (it was the third class and so I was tired) it slipped out again. Geeze Louise.
Sorry, I say to the class, just a pairing of words that I seem to have adopted.
Oh, that one's been around for a while -- a student tells me.
Who knew.

Habits. I pick them up, I cannot break them. Ask me about my enduring habit of eating nuts and crackers after dinner. Not hungrily. Just out of habit. Geeze Louise.

In other news -- it's Thursday. The hard day. The day when I finally accept Ed's (repeated) offer of Chinese take out.






The day when I ride Rosie to work as the sun rises over the fields of corn and return as the sun has set over those same fields.





Ed sleeps, Isis sleeps, I listen to the silence. No more robocalls, no calls at all, just the quiet of a farmhouse evening. Time to reach for the crackers and the pistachio nuts.

why

I love this about Ed: he has never asked me why I blog. Nor has he asked me why I travel to Europe so often, or why I eat oatmeal with fruit for most every breakfast, or why I drink wine with dinner. He himself, of course, does not blog, does not feel compelled to cross the ocean even once a year let alone three or four times, does not eat regular anything and thinks wine is merely perverted grape juice. And yet he never questions any of it, not once, therefore, suggesting that I should maybe try being like him.

It's a rare person who offers that level of acceptance (there are others, but I'm focusing on just him right now).

I have to admit that it was at times unsettling to reciprocate in the same way. During our first trip to France together, back in December of 2005, I was getting ready for the usual evening dinner. I'm not hungry -- he said to me. You eat. I'll sit with you, but I'm just not hungry for dinner. I vaguely recall bursting into tears. Within an hour, he was suggesting that maybe he should take off for a few days on his own. Within two hours, we were friends again. It was not the last time that I wasn't able to resist challenging what he thought was right for him, but over time, these challenges have became rare. Like learning to trust your child with their sorrow, so, too, I would trust Ed to proceed without my interference.

As a result, there are ways in which we accommodate each other that are so uniquely geared to our temperaments that you would truly laugh if I spelled them out here. Words that are spoken, others that are never spoken, a future undefined, a day made unremarkable deliberately, a shirt unwashed, a cat indulged, life lived from day to day without causing pain (so far as one can do that), without taking away from the other the right to shape her, his own idea of what is decent and fair and good.

I was thinking of this when I was driving home from work.






Unlike Ed, Isis has matured by moving toward a newer model of cat-identity, at the same time that he has coaxed me into become more like… Ed. A year ago, if you had told me that I would soon have a cat call the farmhouse 'home' I would have laughed. Isis still eats his cat food at the sheep shed, but as I watch him tonight, following me to the kitchen when I grill brats and cook local (frozen) corn and as I look into his wistful eyes, I know that I have made a fresh and honest cat out of him and that he has made a cat-tolerating woman out of me. (At times, cat-loving. At times.)

It was a gray day. Never mind, I worked through most of it. And though Ed offered to get Chinese takeout, in the end, we ate the turkey brats.

a big Tuesday with small photos

It was the kind of day where you just see no point in taking a camera out. Wet, drizzly, cold. With an occasional snowflake -- but the sort that goes by unnoticed by a photo lens. Nothing lasting, nothing pretty at all. Add to it a full day of teaching and and and -- a camera that develops a problem: a spot permanently ensconced somewhere within the lens!

In any case, not a good camera day.


Four years ago, the campus buzzed on election day. Today, you could not tell that anything out of the ordinary was taking place. State Street, too, looked bleak. Empty.







I did vote. In my small place south of Madison. Anyone who has voted will tell you that election places in this country are not terribly photogenic for a person just passing through with a camera in her pocket. Gym rooms, church halls, community centers… Institutional settings. Bare walls, harsh lighting, somber faces, and a handful of observers, watching, waiting. (In my little corner of Wisconsin, they tell me they have observed nothing amiss.)

At Paul's Cafe we exhaled, but not for long.

Home. A wet, wet, drippy farmette. Ed is trailing behind me, I greet Isis who has that 'where have you been?? It's dinner!'  look about him.





So I feed him in the sheep shed -- which we still think of as his home base -- and then I retreat to the farmhouse. With a look toward the wet fields, the drippy orchard branches.





But Isis follows me right back to the farmhouse, and now Ed is here as well, and I'm cooking, and Ed is trying, trying so hard to use credit reward points to purchase some secondary flights for us in January, and the election results are starting to come in, and it is at this time that Isis decides to call the farmhouse his home, and he demonstrates this by basically emptying his gut and his bladder in favorite spots -- an (apparently) favorite carpet, a closet, oh thanks, Isis! My cauliflower is burning, Ed's on the phone with the Rewards people and Florida is undecided and you poop and pee now? What kind of a cat are you?

Fact is, it's not his fault. We've avoided the inevitable. He likes it here. Yet, I never agreed to have a litter box here. We just let him out when he wanted to be let out. It worked.

Until today. The rains came down, Isis stayed in. Without a litter box, he created his own favorite bathroom situations.

And Florida is still undecided.

Ed is now playing volleyball (he's hardcore about it: if there is a game, he plays), I've cleaned up, Isis is sleeping on the couch next to me. Let the elections results roll in!


(And if anyone didn't think Wisconsin counted, it did. And two minutes ago, NBC called it. I exhale.)

frosted over

Several yoga classes back, toward the end of the hour, the yoga instructor came over to where I was doing the final savasana -- a relaxation pose that is aptly referred to sometimes as the corpse pose -- and she gently massaged my forehead. I thought then that she was giving me a bonus kick. Because I had told her earlier that I really liked her sequences. But a funny thing happened after she soften my forehead -- I noticed that my whole face was less taught. For all these years, I believed that I had etched on my forehead a frown born of determination. You know, the immigrant, determined to make a go of it here. She saw in it tension and she coaxed me into letting that fold away, along with everything else that in fact does fold away during a savasana.


On Mondays, my work tensions mount. Not that I even notice or pay much attention to this. It happens, I move forward. But this morning, it causes me to hesitate: maybe I shouldn't go to the Obama/Springsteen rally early, so early, 7 a.m early? I don't usually go to rallies, but it had been a long election period and I had thought maybe I should show this small amount of support for the candidate of my choice.

But, at the last minute, I change my mind. I look out, note the frost, think about all that I could accomplish if I did not devote three hours to displaying support. (For one, I could get a wonderful fifteen more minutes of sleep.) And so I scratch the idea of going to the rally.

Feeling bad that I had just given in to a weakness, I push myself to get up and take an exhilarating Rosie ride in the post dawn hours when the frost is still thick and the temperatures hover around 23 (and that's while standing still).

Frost can be so very pretty in the faint light of a winter sun (in Wisconsin, it feels like we're done with fall).





Our neighbor across the road grows trees -- Christmas trees. Frost tinted this morning.






In the fields -- the rough brown color is gone. We have before us the work of the frost elves.






And so I do my Rosie morning loop, no more than five or six miles, stopping now and then to smile at the enormous beauty of the landscape, at once without the dazzle of color, but as if brush stroked to a softness that is gentle and kind.





It takes a while for me to warm up after that, but, the sun comes and goes all day long and I follow it from room to room when it is there and eventually, I forget that it is cold outside.

And I do go back to yoga today, and even though it's Monday and the instructor is rather tough on the whole lot of us. That frosty ride set me, I think, in a good direction for a quiet and productive day.

Even if I do have to let out a sigh when I note how quickly the sun sets these days.

prairie Sunday

I'm getting terribly spoiled: I take yet another day, granted, a Sunday, but still a day off. Schoolwork can wait until tomorrow.

We wake up to a brisk and gently pretty fall day.





And if I put off computer work, that frees me to do other work. The kind Ed and I used to do quite regularly: clearing off brush and invasives on and around the Ice Age Trail. Today a handful of volunteers are meeting on the Brooklyn segment -- just fifteen miles south of us. (The drive there is so Wisconsin, so November, so farm-ish!)





(And speaking of farm-ish, we left Farmer Lee's sister (who is also a farmer) working away at our fields out back. Neither of the sisters is ever willing to accept imperfection. Make better. Always make the soil, the crop, the life just a tad better.)






Of course, we're late for the meet up at the Ice Age Trail work day and we haven't a clue where they're working. We walk south on the trail…





…we walk north...






... and we're about to give up when we come across the (quitter than usual!) crew. We are given a large patch of prairie that has everything from Russian Olive to honeysuckle aggressively taking hold.



 



 We work a little, pause for their lunch break with the others…









…work some more. It's such a beautiful spot! And if I groaned earlier about the dullness of the colors this month, here, I am spellbound by the ribbons of blue and gold.






And so we work longer than usual. Long enough to come across this fellow, sowing seeds on the prairie.










And if ever there was a delightful brief encounter, it was exactly this, with him, casting to the wind handfuls of white eiderdown-like seeds. As I take my  photo he tells me -- just get the spelling of my name right -- Mr. Volunteer, with a capital V. A wandering young lad, passing through Wisconsin (and volunteering on the Trail while he's here), moving from one state to the next, thinking of staying, thinking of moving on. For all my inclinations toward movement, toward exploration, I cannot remember ever being this restless.







Trout. We have trout for dinner. My girl and her husband come over and I get so wrapped up in the delicious pleasure of having them here that I forget to take the photo -- until they are out the door.





Ed and I retreat then into our own spaces even as we sit on the same couch doing so. I write, he reads. We work in silence. It is the way we process the day, the week, our time together.

November thoughts

This morning, we woke to a brief burst of snowflakes. Nothing memorable. You would have to use a spyglass to locate traces of it, but still,  it signals winter.




 A leisurely morning. A lovely meal with Ed and Isis…





Immediately after, I go to another yoga class. Again with my friend, who is rapidly becoming my yoga buddy, which is so good, because whenever she asks  -- want to go? -- unless I'm working, I am happy to fly down and meet her there.


But, I'm not really flying. I'm driving more and more now. The old donkey car is back in almost daily circulation. It is as it has to be. I will not ride Rosie on (soon to be) icy roads.


Returning from yoga, I veer a little into the dirt road that leads down to the fields where Farmer Lee and her various sisters and cousins work. There are still some reluctant but lovely plants standing…





…and I notice that here, too, they've been tilling and preparing for spring…





…but no one is out working today. I would not be surprised if I do not see anyone here again until next spring.





At home, the sun pokes through for a fleeting second and I seize the opportunity to do a beard trim for Ed. We'd fallen behind our monthly schedule. Neither of us notices the beard as much in winter. As if it's to be expected that a face should be covered against the cold.

We have the bucket of carrots to contend with. Last night I hosed down a few and then scrubbed them some more with a potato brush. I have to smile at this added farm work. On any day, we eat a lot of carrots. Mostly the kind that are pretend baby carrots. All nicely scrubbed and locked into a plastic bag. (For cooking, I reach for the bundles). Lee, by giving us this loaded pail of mud-caked oddly shaped roots reminded me that it's both a pleasure and a burden to get them ready for the table. And since Ed doesn't want to load the pipes with clay soil, we do the work outside.

Outside, too, is where the carrots will stay for the winter. Right in the space above our well. Ed climbs down to investigate the possibilities.





Inside, I flick the thermostat up another degree. End of daylight savings time. Let's keep things warm inside. Until sometime in March, when we can have our lovely long evenings back again.

back to normal

I don't know about you, but my 'normal' varies. A summer normal is not a spring normal is not an autumn normal is not a December - January normal. And no normal bears any resemblance to my October normal. So maybe it's wrong to think of myself as being back in the fold of routines, since I don't seem to have any that I stay with through the year. And yet, it sure feels like today was rather normal. For a Friday, that is.

It meant that I had time for a morning yoga class (it had been weeks, and it felt like it had been weeks), this time with a friend, which makes it nicer, even though I had to dash immediately to campus afterwards.

It meant that I had a long string of student appointments, followed by a faculty meeting, followed by catch up desk work, followed by grocery shopping for the week. All typical Friday stuff.

But here's the joy of joys: I come back home and there is nothing that I have to do before tomorrow. I can read a book, take a walk, cook dinner, take a nap (though the bed is already amply occupied by two other nappers.  So long as we're into photographing sleeping guys, let me sneak up on the two upstairs... Typical sight. In bed, jacket on, computer on chest, cat wanders over to the window).






Outside, it's a little hazy, a little gray, a little cold. The truck farmers to our east have fire going. I'm not sure if it's there to burn stuff or if it's there to keep warm in these last hours of farm work.





 It surely looks like they have the fields ready for the planting season.






Closer to the farmhouse, I come across a surprising display of resiliance. A day lily that will not give up the ship. Straining to bloom in November.






I make chicken soup for supper. Lot's of chicken. And Farmer Lee's carrots. Which take a lot of scrubbing, but hey, what are brushes for, if not this.

We eat and track the news.





...Until we each are more asleep than awake, or at least I feel that this is so.

the first day of november

I had to go easy on Isis this night. In my most difficult week, he had stayed low. Often, he'd avoid the farmhouse. As if he knew that I just hadn't the energy for his foibles. When he came this might, I petted him profusely. He'd earned it.

Not to say that he was humble in his acceptance of my gratitude. He sprawled on the bed, between my limbs and refused to move.



photo by Ed


I was so tired, that mostly, I payed no attention.
See?? Ed tells me… You can sleep through anything! Storms at sea, anything!
We'd been having this discussion -- whether I am capable of ever enjoying a long boat ride (it's part of our winter break planning). I say no, he says yes. In our life together, vetoes usually prevail.






This morning, I set out on Rosie feeling chilled, rushed and tired. But knowing, too, that the toughest work period of the entire year is (mostly) behind me. So that's a good thing. And anyone out and about today would have noticed and given a nod to our great Midwestern sky. Nowhere in the planet is it more expansive, beautiful, humbling than here, for us, standing in Wisconsin fields of grain (and other more interesting crops).






Then follows the hellishly busy Thursday. Teach, work, work, teach, teach, work work work, office hours, office hours, office hours, phew. Done.

I thought I'd be stumbling home now, depleted, desensitized, but no! It is a gorgeous evening!






Full of... sky!






At the farmette, we have s surprise gift. Farmer Lee left this for us.






Ed tells me we should winter them over in our root cellar. I didn't even know we had a root cellar.  Isis looks on.






It is the evening of a promised dinner out. Not a big deal dinner out, but a "you don't have to cook" dinner out. The kind where we each take along good reading matter (no kidding) and we look for a place to sit at the bar (at our local Dane Pub). There is a pool table behind us and as we wait for our food, Ed asks -- you want to?  Of course, it's one of those things that he's done quite a bit of in the past and I've done hardly at all and so our talents are mismatched, but that's fine -- it makes for a quick game, after which we can go back to our reading materials.



another Ed photo


We ride his motorbike back to the farmhouse when it's good and dark, good and cold too. At home, he asks if I want a hot shower to warm up. No, just turn on yesterday's Jon Stewart and sit next to me. And of course, very quickly, in mid-sentence, I doze off.

October 31

I dressed like a pumpkin today. That is, I wore an orange shirt and green cords. My students looked somewhat skeptical, but I tell you, that's about as dressed up as I've gotten on this day. Ever.

Why is it that some people love to dress up and others can't really muster up enthusiasm for it? Costume or cocktail dress -- none of it excites me. I care about the clothes I wear and yet, I can't seem to warm to the idea of dress-up.

(Excuse me: I forgot to post the morning shot. In honor of Maine, I suppose -- the poster of the fishing boats is from there...)





(And I should post this shot -- from Rosie's back, on the way to work. It makes me think we have mountains at the horizon. As you'll have guessed, actually -- they're clouds.)





At Paul's cafe this afternoon, the barista spoke excitedly about a hypothetical costume she wanted to wear: dead, bloody face and a sexy dress... when people ask what am I, I'd answer -- dead sexy. But I figured this is a child-friendly place and that wouldn't fit in. She seemed disappointed. I'd be thrilled if somebody told me I shouldn't dress up.

And yet, I like holidays. I like special days, pretty days, as Ed would say -- Hallmark days. Days of humor, warmth, days of pumpkins, if pumpkins be the way to go.

Pumpkins. I can do pumpkins! Out back, left by the farmers who farm there.





And creaky barn, with cobwebs and mice and who knows what other vermin inside.





After? Too tired to sleep. Catch up time. Scheduling a whirlwind of late afternoon/evening office hours tomorrow. Because if you give written feedback to students (this is what kept me up nights the last days), they always like to review it in person. All 54 of them. Which is a good thing. Except for the fact that there are 54 of them.