moving through the day

Yoga is surprisingly addictive. I notice this only now -- two and a half months into my yoga adventure. Like many others, I'd been hooked before on some form of physical activity. Bike riding. I had to, had to, had to ride. That always fizzled when the weather turned. Gym -- I used to be a gym goer. I never really liked it, but I went, daily even, hating the idea of no gym. So I understand that I belong to those who have an "easily hooked" type of personality. (In case you have lingering doubts, I offer you daily Ocean posting as a further example.) Still, I didn't think I'd like yoga this much. That once the movements, poses, breathing routines became familiar, I would feel indulged every time I went through the routines. And that I'd make room for them even on a day like today -- a teaching day.  So that I had to do the early class or no class at all. Though after breakfast. (Maybe because I love my breakfast routine as much as I now love yoga. Can you tell?)





Going to yoga, I notice that it is a quintessentially Novembrian morning: very gray.






Which eventually turns into a cornflower blue morning (this on the way to campus).


 


And then a gold toned evening (from Rosie's saddle, going home).






Other news?

Well, there is the matter of Isis. The cat is now fully committed to being by my side whenever I am working in the kitchen. He may be sleeping on the bed upstairs, but if he hears me rattle kitchen utensils, he'll wake up, run down, sit back and wait for a handout. Like this.





Dogs will yelp and drool and the insistent types will scramble up to grab something off the counter. Isis will sit and wait. And wait. Until my feelings of guilt and admiration and impatience -- all scrambled together  -- will cause me to find something in my kitchen riches for him to enjoy. (He used to love cheese curds until I introduced him to salmon and, more recently, ground turkey from the chili.)

Ed tells me this is my doing. Maybe. But I feel no guilt in showing the dear cat the finer sides of food. Life is more than Friskies.


Other news? We made it to Paul's today, just before it closed. I needed that blueberry tea (in a blueberry mug). It had been a long day and tomorrow, workwise, will be even longer.

Tuesday

If I could borrow a few hours from yesterday or tomorrow, I would do it. Sweet time, time when I'm not tired, time when I have the will to be something here, on Ocean, something other than worry that minutes are racing too quickly toward a day's end.

I don't have those extra hours. No one is handing out extra time, not today, not on any day and so all  I can do is concentrate on the photographed moments from this day and thankfully there are several and the post will be about those and nothing more (was there anything more?):

First, the breakfast that always dazzles because it is pure and good and so often defined by streaks of sunlight.





Then, the Rosie ride to work. Now that's cold! I almost gave up on her. We were below freezing when I left for work and all the layers in the world couldn't keep that riders' wind from hitting anywhere that it could.





Can you tell how outrageously blue it was today? So much so that during my break between class number 2 and class number 3, I ran down to our lake just to see how it would look if you piled all those blues together, one on top of the other. I was glad that I did. On days like this, Lake Mendota is absolutely dazzling.






The Rosie ride from work was in winds that were a few degrees warmer, but I was a few degrees less capable of fighting off coldness and so I can readily say that this was a low point. Even as, at sunset, the farm fields were golden and lovely and so I was glad to look up and take a quick photo.





Evening dinner: when I'm tired, I like chopping and mixing. So I made turkey chili...


 


... which was terribly appropriate because it had been a cold day and now I just wanted something hearty before me and of course, immediately after, Ed went to play volley ball and I began my evening-long fight with sleep.

And at this moment, I can honestly say that sleep won.

Monday

So many of us like that thrilling first snowfall. The one that's deep and has a life span of more than an hour or so. Heavy on fir branches, or, light and puffy on every bare twig. A silent moment of rare beauty.

But that's not the way winter usually comes our way. It's more like today: there'll be gray skies, then a cloud break, with streaks of sunlight and maybe you'll just catch one such cloudbreak, even if it's a workday for you, a day mostly spent indoors. (I did, on my way to an early, pre-breakfast yoga class.)





Then the sun disappears again, at which point we prefer to think about something other than the weather. Maybe like us, you eat breakfast by a window and you don't even pay attention to what's out there.





Even as Ed glances outdoors and comments -- there's that brown Wisconsin landscape… And I groan. But then he chides me for it -- do you remember how beautiful it is when the snow comes? Well yes, sure, but it's not here yet and don't hold your breath either, because we can go through many weeks of cold and brown and no snow.


We come out of our worlds of work -- mine's now at the computer, Ed's is still outdoors, still with that honeysuckle maze of sawed off branches -- for a late lunch at the kitchen table. Peanut butter and jam. Strawberry for him, heaped heavily, blueberry for me, heaped lightly. And I drink tea and he drinks hot chocolate and I suppose that's a reminder of where we're at with our calendars because he only asks for hot chocolate when we're traveling or, at home, when it's cold outside.




And as we talk about inconsequential but interesting things (travel!) I glance up and notice flakes of snow. There's your picture -- Ed tells me. He's sweet in pointing out possibilities, especially on days when there really are none to speak of. But I'm ignoring them. That stuff wouldn't even show up on a photo, I mutter.

But when he goes out to his sheep shed to take care of this or that, I do take out my camera and I aim it back at our entrance to the farmhouse. Just for that insignificant dusting of snow on our brick walk. Because even in these small amounts, snow is just so beautiful!

nature's ways

I've said this before -- we don't have just good weather days or bad weather days. Systems move through randomly, suddenly. A morning may be breezy and warm and by afternoon -- wet, miserably wet and cold. Today, forecasts were made along those lines. Toasty and dry in the morning, chilly and wet in the afternoon. When I started in on Sunday housecleaning routines, my still sleepy guy glanced outside and reminded me that we hadn't quite finished our clipping and chopping down of honeysuckle yesterday.

Finished! Who is he kidding? We can't finish! In addition to the shrubs that have taken hold in the pririe, we have  monster honeysuckle along the edge of the property and they extend well beyond. Most every prairie and forest around here suffers from an explosion of honeysuckle. But, he is right:  we could at least try to contain it on the farmette land. We started last spring, we may as well continue.

And so before breakfast, before finishing the cleaning operations at the farmhouse, we head out under tumultuous but thus far dry skies.



right now, if it's green, it's honeysuckle


And Ed turns ambitious. It happens: a small project grows and becomes something grand and therefore overwhelming. He has his eye on that monster honeysuckle at the tree line. Out comes the power saw.





Me, I stick with the I stick with the waist high bushes that have invaded our prairie. I'm thinking how last week I quoted a forest ranger to my class -- Nature is very unforgiving! -- he had said. (It was a Torts class and we were talking about people who go adventuring, sustain injuries, then sue.) My thoughts stray to nature's fickle habits and as I continue slashing (but not burning -- that'll happen next spring), I nearly stumble on a skull. Deer? Teeth look good, even if the poor animal did succumb to some menace or other.





And now I'm tired. But Ed's task is so huge and he would benefit from some assistance and so we persevere. We tug, slash, saw and heave and then I can do no more. I want my morning coffee! Even though it's no longer morning.






And as we call it quits, the rains come down. I mean, really comes down. Furiously so.





We stay indoors. I finish cleaning and look up to notice that it's almost time for my late afternoon yoga class. And from that I move to quick dinner prep (my girl and her husband come over, still happy, still in love, still delightful).






As I take laundry out and put dishes away and as Ed, yet again, attempts to understand the malfunctioning water heater, I think how easy it is to give away a whole weekend to physical labor. We did just that! It's a good way for me to restore balance. Kind of like yoga class, only without the mat.

November?

Morning. Fussing in the kitchen. The compost pail needs to be emptied. I step outside. Wow! Where did this come from? What a glorious day! With promises of sunshine and bursts of warm wind. An exhilarating moment as I realize that there is no work, nothing that needs to be done today. Ed! Outside! Come look!

I'm thinking we ought to hike. He rifles through possible hikes, trail building, seed planting… But as we talk about the possibilities, I mention to him that on my walk to the compost heap, I sidestepped to the back of the farmette. For the fine morning view.



fields to the north



milkweed seed pods



ever blooming pansies by the farmhouse



and of course, the farmhouse


And I saw, to my dismay, that many of the invasive honeysuckle shrubs -- the ones we so meanly hacked away at last spring -- have sprouted once more. Despite the careful dabbing of Round-Up. We take a walk together toward the back and as we look around us, it becomes clear that we shouldn't put our efforts to prairies elsewhere: we have our own overgrown prairie to put in order.

But first there is breakfast...





...and yoga with my yoga buddy. (It's so good to share yoga with a friend! You can do it alone, but going at it with a friend on the mat at the side is special.)


At home, Ed and I get to work.

We need to snip off those new honeysuckle branches. And there are a lot of them. If we keep at it, they will eventually disappear. So they say on the Internet.

But I'm not complaining.  Farmette work never felt so solid and rewarding! I shake off the sweatshirt and feel the sun on my bare arms again. In November!





We pause for lunch. Over a peanut butter sandwich we confront yet another issue -- one that we've tabled for too long (only because there is no great and easy solution). We need to protect the orchard we planted last spring. Several of the small fruit trees are already irreparably damaged by deer. If we don't act now, we may ever to see an apple, cherry or pear. (To say nothing of our blueberry patch behind it.)

Ed has toyed with several possible solutions and we try to erect one, around just one tree.





There's a lot of laughter (laughter is so much more pleasurable than frustrated groans and exclamations) as we dig the poles in and watch the tubes, wrapped in deer netting, sway with the wind. It may work, but I can tell that Ed's not satisfied. And so we let it rest for now. It's something to mull over. To revisist tomorrow, or another time.


We have one more task that we can do before the sun disappears for the day: we'll move the seemingly hundreds of stones that Farmer Lee has taken out of the field. We'll load them onto the Deere trailer. Clearing the space will allow for an extension of the farming field someday. At the very least it'll tidy up the back strip of farmette land.





It's a Herculean effort to get all the stones onto the wagon, but we do it just as the last wisps of sunlight disappear behind the clouds at the horizon.

The barn stands in shadows now. The light fades.









There isn't much to be said about dinner this evening. We have scattered leftover that Ed wants to pull together into a meal. My ambition runs only toward adding roasted brussels sprouts and scrambling eggs.

But what a day this has been! Of course, at the moment we're both rather stiff and I'm barely awake. Still, I listen to the terrific gusts of wind outside. I know they'll eventually usher back in winter air. Today was a gift. A brilliant gift.

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.