working the soil

It was supposed to rain today, a relentless kind of rain and so when Ed nudges me at dawn and says -- look at the color in the sky -- I go out to take a quick photo because I'm thinking there won't be another opportunity to shoot the outdoors.





Then of course, I cannot fall back asleep. Too many things to do outside.

The air is humid and I know there surely will be more rain. The skies look uncertain. Droplets of water linger on every growing thing.








our resident groundhog


But it's not raining now. And so I'm back with my flowers -- digging, weeding, looking for signs of winter damage, fitting in newcomers.













Ed and Isis look on


Breakfast is very very late.






The day never slows down, though I do get a break from outdoor work in the afternoon. More showers. Ed and I do a Woodman's run. And then it's back to our grand project -- the extended farmhouse to sheep shed flowerbed. It is a huge job. Ripping out the grass cover alone can break the spirit of even the most stubbornly ambitious gardener (and her assistant).






We persevere. And by the end of the day, the stuff that needs to be ripped out is ripped out and the woodchip cover is nearly in place.






We stumble to the farmhouse. Ed instantly falls asleep on the couch and I plod at a ridiculously slow pace to put dinner on our little table. Nothing complicated. Leftover soup, herring on toast, salad. Though, do you notice the little orange glass to the left? An Aperol Spritz! A reward for a day of hard, very hard work outside.

wet

An unusually cold, wet day. Not uninteresting. Just drippy wet.





Isis came in at an ungodly hour (is it ever otherwise?), left, came in again, undecided. My sleep tracked that pattern.

In the end, we were all up earlier than usual. Isis lead the way, but we all had full schedules. And so it was funny that Ed chose this more hurried time to search out cherry trees for our nascent orchard. We lost a couple of trees this winter. They were young -- sticks, nothing more -- and they succumbed to the drought, to the deer, to everything under the sun. We wanted to try again.

All this to say that breakfast was not a relaxed introduction to the day. It was a time to study again root crops and pollination schedules and to make some decisions about the future of the orchard.





That done, the day could move forward.

The earliest hours were, for me, still lost in the haze of May planting, or at least planning for planting. For instance, on my way to campus, I made a quick detour to the Flower Factory because I had forgotten to pick up a Happy Returns lily. My entire game plan for the border by the farmhouse walkway revolves around that lily.

There is, of course, much that should also be added to the emergent flower strip that Ed and I are creating -- the one that links the farmhouse with the sheep shed -- but we're proceeding slowly there.  Seeds are a nice frugal filler for new large beds. I used a lot of seeds these last days: 4 packs of nasturtium, three packs of cosmos, etc.

At the nearly empty grounds of the Flower Factory, I walked with my umbrella from one hoop house to the next, remembering when the place opened some twenty years ago. I was so happy to see that perennials were finally catching on here, in the States.






Today, I had that same feeling of appreciative delight. So much color, even on this bleakest of spring days.


Bleak -- yes. But not a deterrent for the hardy few. There will always be those who'll be out on the waters of our lakes so long as there isn't an ice cover.






Supper. If ever there was a night to make soup -- this was it. I should have kept to our favorites, but instead I was tempted to replicate a chickpea concoction from the newspaper. It was a boring soup. The salad added the color. The soup -- the protein I suppose.





Not everything about a wet day is perfect. For example, Isis left wet prints on the floor every time he went out then in again. And the flowers -- there will always be those that lay down flat under the heaviness of a steady rainfall. But, the paw prints dry, the flowers perk up again. May is kind in that way: it almost always apologizes for its mistakes.

ambition

Ambitious people are a little headstrong. They fight the naysayers. They take calculated risks. They imagine results that aren't really likely. And then they work to make them happen anyway. They never wait for opportunity. They don't believe in opportunity. They believe in taking charge.

Surely it's not a good thing, therefore, to be overly ambitious. You should take note of your limitations! Scale down! Work hard and adjust accordingly!

Good points, just not ones I could ever live by. I've always veered toward being ridiculously ambitious. Though perhaps not in the way you would define ambition. Mine is a little jumpy. One day it may be doing a class of all classes, the next -- to eat the most perfect breakfast on the porch.

Today, it isn't about the classes or the breakfast. For one thing, it's cooled down a bit. So we eat indoors. The sunroom.





The ambition focuses on the outdoors. Sometime in the middle of the day Ed asks -- do you suppose we should extend the flower bed all the way (from the farmhouse) to the sheep shed?

Say what? That would mean ripping out mountains of quack grass and creating insane amounts of space for multiples of  flowers, strawberries, who knows what else.

Yes!





So we begin the job. Neither of us really has the time for it right now and yet, once started, my insane ambitions click in and I want to do it all, today, now, perfectly.

We work our tails off. I don't know how else to put it. We rip, dig, clear. It turns out to be a hellacious  project, yet I never once reconsider.





The bed is (mostly) cleared. We need to dump chips on it. Then plant it.

Ed grunts -- who'll take care of this if you die? (We are prone to such curious conversations.)
Don't worry! Perennial beds last forever. (I say this, but I don't mean it. So I guess I have to keep on living. There's no other way.)


In the early evening we head out to Jung's garden center in search of replacement (dwarf) fruit trees for our young orchard (the starting of it was last year's ambitious project). We're too late. Dwarf cherries, pears -- all gone. Sold out.

We settled for bareroot strawberries. Last year's strawberry crop was a total failure. All devoured by... well, I don't really know by which species of animal. For some reason, we think that merely by planting again we'll be lucky this time around. As if the wild animals are satiated. Or tantalized by other garden crops.






It's been an exhilarating set of days. I'm glad that it'll be cold and wet tomorrow. I have a boatload of work to do. I can't afford another day of ridiculous ambition.

May 1st

All photos were taken before noon. After, you could say that the dirt accumulation around my hands, arms, made me an unlikely candidate for manipulating a camera.

I come back to this question: why am I addicted to working outside? Because I really am that. And I knew it when I moved to the farmette and I sighed deeply and moved here anyway and now, when the weather is as it is (today: perfect), I will use every spare minute to dig, transplant, chop... oh, the list is so long! I ache just thinking back to it all.

Perennial planting has been in my blood for decades even as I can't say I'm very much of an expert at it. I move by impulse and that's not always a wise way to proceed. For instance, I pulled at least three plants out today and then hurriedly replanted them. They were not dead. (It's not always easy to tell on May 1.)

Ed worked with me for a while...


 


...but he has his indoor work projects and they did not end the same day I stopped teaching for the year. So much of the day I worked alone.

A late breakfast on the porch...










...a quick glance at the farmers to the east of us, working tirelessly, with bent backs, shielded in multiple ways from the sun.





And finally, a glance back at the farmhouse. Do you remember how brown it all was just a week ago? Not so now.





I know these warm days will moderate soon. There's rain in the forecast. That's fine. The soil remains dry here. We haven't quite left the drought of last year behind us. But these past few days, my hands are roughened and dirtied by the soil and scratches have appeared on my arms, legs, even stomach (an errant branch did that). I've caught two ticks and I've watched endless worms retreat as I poke at their breeding ground. It's been grand. Really, over the top wonderful.

like sugar

When a pal of Ed's took his heavy tractor out back of the farmette to create a field for Farmer Lee to plant, he said -- this is just the first step. They'll go over it with a hand tiller and then with a hoe. Again and again. They like the dirt to be like sugar!

That's a lot of work. We have weeds, quack grass and heavy clay soil every which way you look. Sugar isn't easily made of clay.



This day, which in practical terms was my last teaching day, dawns warm. Really warm. The storms have moved east and slowly most of the cloud cover followed.






Breakfast, a very early one, is on the porch. No sweater needed. Warm.






I set out to campus on rosie, despite the fact that I have to pick up boxes of treats for my very last ever Family Law class.






One more class after that and then the teaching day is over! Sure, there's work ahead. The summer will have chunks of it throughout (I know: for this I took a pay cut?). But the regularity of it will not be there. With the end of classes, I regain control of my time. Time to concentrate on the essentials, like -- the weather! A high of 87 today. 87!






People complain that it is too hot. How quickly we forget January, February, March!

Ed and I celebrate the end of my teaching semester. No, no party, no drinks downtown, no dinner out. We go to the Flower Factory where you can find just about any perennial that'll grow this side of the Mississippi.

Ed patiently waits while I drag a cart from one greenhouse to the next, picking out old favorites for the new flower beds we're creating.






The hot winds howl and turn daffodils into leaning towers of Pisa. But I persevere.






Back at the farmhouse, I do a celebratory supper of, well, our stuff. Salad. Market oyster mushrooms and scrambled eggs. Asparagus. Smoked salmon bits. tomato. Some ancient bagel for Ed. Our kind of meal.






And as it is still so light, so warm, so delightfully summerlike, we go right back outside to work -- lay chips for the new bed, and rototill the parts chipped over last year. For this, Ed takes out his baby tiller and we work long and hard to get it started. As the sun sets, I plow on.





...until it is too dark and I think that maybe I'm plowing under good rose bushes and budding coreopsis.  Not quite like sugar, but still, the beds are tilled and nearly ready for planting.

roots

Perhaps if you are not a first generation immigrant, you wouldn't know this -- but for most of us who came here from an 'old country,' our identification with that 'old country' changes over time. It isn't been static. Or even linear.

Legally speaking, I'm a dual. I am Polish by birth, I am American also, as it turns out, by birth (my mother was born to an American citizen -- it's a complicated story). And except for the days I spend each year in Poland, I am right now closer to feeling American than Polish. I've let my Polish passport and ID card lapse. My Polishness isn't very evident. The farmhouse has little of it on display, for example.

In the last years of my father's life, I'd tease him that he is the most 'Polish' in our family of mixed up identities. He'd grunt and say -- I am a citizen of the world. He was not fond of displays of nationalism.

But the law does not acknowledge citizens of the world. And so, I remain a dual.

And here's a curious detail: in attempting to help my sister tidy up matters pertaining to my father's death, I find out that even if I am a dual, in Poland, I must act as a Pole.

Okay. I'll act as a Pole. Dzien dobry, jak sie masz! I know the vernacular.
No, not enough. I must also provide documentation that I am a Pole.
Say what? I have an expired Polish passport. Will that work?
No! Not enough. I must provide further evidence. Birth certificates. Papers, in Polish, attesting to my past Polishness. And I must present these in person in Chicago, at the Polish Consulate. Then they will deliberate. And determine whether my Polishness survived the years when it lapsed.
Ed grins -- someone is trying to justify staffing a Consulate. Why else require a personal appearance?

Well now, maybe he's right. Let me skip all this silliness. Forget about proving my Polishness! I'll settle matters having to do with my dad as an American!
Nuh uh. Cannot do that. If I'm Polish, I must appear as a Pole.
But I was just told that my lapsed passport puts me in the category of not assuredly Polish! 
That's between me and the Consulate. For purposes of my father's affairs, I am Polish and need to appear as a Pole. With supporting documents. Which I cannot readily get, or at least not without an interview with someone at the Polish Consulate. For a thumbs up or a thumbs down as to my Polishness.

I write all this because I am forever amazed at how unnecessarily complicated life can be in some places. Stay tuned. The subject of my Polishness is going to haunt me all year long as I struggle through other people's definitions of what it means to be Polish.


Otherwise, this Monday is a continuation of the beautiful, springlike week-end days.

Breakfast on the porch.





Daffodils now officially exploding.






I do still have to teach and rosie and I set out just as big droplets of rain come down, but we outrun them! I never quite get wet.


And in the early evening...



(my welcoming committee) 


...the sun almost pokes through. It's warm and lovely and even though it's suppertime, I stay for a while in the yard, digging up weed roots, ripping out bits of old fabric in the soil.







Ed asks -- what do you most like about gardening? The planting?
I don't have a quick answer. I love working outdoors, but no act -- clearing, planting, tending -- is somehow better, more likable than another.
I like the result! -- I blurt out. And I know this is the closest to the truth. I love perennial beds. I'll go to great lengths to add to them, to support them, to expand them. To create new ones.

The next three weeks are the most intense for any perennial nut here, in Madison. I'm so ready for it!

Sunday

We should have used sunscreen, I say to Ed. Say what? Was it really that warm today?

Yes it was. 73 degrees may not stir your insides much, but it surely is revolutionary for us.

You'll understand if I wont write much. The day flew too quickly. A gallop of hours well spent and before you know it's done.

 So, you know the order. Breakfast. This time before yoga.






After? Oh, now, there are two words and only two words needed to describe the hours after: work outside.

Dig, weed, transplant -- all that. And sow. Peas today.






We talk about what to do with the depleted raspberry patch (plant a new one). About whether to expand the flower bed by the sheep shed path (yes). And whether to turn over more land to Farmer Lee and her sister (yes).






A pause from work to eat a lunch. PB&J, outside, on the porch.






I've wanted this time of outdoorsiness, of porch life, of sunshine for so long! It's a pinch yourself moment of deep joy.






In the evening my older girl comes over. Her husband has work obligations and so she is here alone...






Like me, she is swayed by the sun. The warmth. The deliciousness of life outside in spring.

We eat, we discuss the state of the world.






And now I'm just minutes away from midnight. There is a work week ahead of me. Not a full one (or at least teaching wise not a full one), but still, it's surely time to let go of this day. Windows are open, the night air is reminiscent of summertime.

It's good to know that summer is the next season. That we move forward. That there will be even more daffodils blooming tomorrow.

face turned toward the delicious world of the outdoors

Perhaps my epithet will read -- "she never did publish that book, but her life was nonetheless forever enlivened and crushed by the written word." That would be accurate, no? I spend an enormous amount of time on reading, describing and communicating what others have said. (Isn't that what being a law is all about?) And more recently, I am spending not a small amount of time trying (and not yet succeeding) to reposition the way my family must redefine 'stuff' now that my father has died. It's awfully complicated.

I'll throw out a tiny piece of what I've discovered: it's very hard *not* to be a Polish citizen. Daughters, did you know that you are that by virtue of being born to one who was? Or, rather, is? Because once you are that, it's not as if it's easy to be not that (even if you wanted to be not that, though it's not clear why you would negate something that hasn't, it seems to me, any negative consequences associated with it).

Anyway, it's because so much of my non work time has been consumed by other paper shuffling activities that when good weather finally came, I threw it all aside and said -- let me be. It's glorious outside. I want to be outdoors.



 


But first, I go to yoga. And let me make a note to myself here: Nina, try not to sign up for 75 minutes of power yoga before breakfast because, really, you'll struggle. And I did. Me amidst those young ones who can twist bodies into incomprehensible positions.

After yoga -- well, breakfast. And by then it is 10 o'clock and the temps have climbed to maybe 60 and isn't that an invitation to eat out (for the first time this year!) on the porch?!






So now I am in the grip of the beautiful spring weather. I do the downtown market with my girl...










...and then she and I take a hike at Indian Lake County Park...






...where, I admit it -- it's not really fully exploding in the way you would want it to explode come spring time, but it's warm outside and the familiar path is welcoming in an early season kind of way.






Later, at the farmette, I cajole Ed into cutting back dead branches and trees and, well, shrubs that may as well be dead. This is difficult for him: he sees cutting a branch that has any remains of growth on it as painfully destructive. So we proceed cautiously. First, out come the *for sure has not lived will not live let's get it out of here* stuff.





And then I make suggestions: it really really really will be better for the tree if we take away these branches. Sometimes he'll agree, other times he'll be too concerned about destroying something for reasons of whimsy rather than necessity. He'll shake his head and I'll let it go. Because really, the goal is only to make things better. To be good stewards. To improve, to cause no harm.


In the evening I make soup. In the big pot the color of my pants. The color of daffodils.
Do the daffodils multiply? -- Ed asks.
Yes. They're naturalizing daffodils.
Do they live forever? 
No... thirty years maybe...
How come they don't crowd each other?
I don't know...

It's good to retain a hefty dose of mystery about the outdoors. To be thrilled with the unexpected.

farmette

It was the finest of fine days! (Even as at the end of it, I can hardly move: too much digging.) Warm, sunny, insistent: come out, come out!

Okay okay okay... But first, there's breakfast.






A rushed meal. Ed has a meeting and I fuss to trim his hair so it looks as if the man has some modicum of style.






I have work to do, but I can hardly concentrate.






The day bees hover over my newly planted alyssum is the day that I must finally stop thinking that this spring is just a passing event.






In between school tasks I put in solid time outside sawing off broken branches, digging up soil, making sense out of the chaos that rules at the farmette right now. I can never quite restore order to the place, but every small job brings me closer. That's all that we ever aim for really -- closer.






Ed comes back in the early afternoon and we work together for a while. We do this so well, he and I. We fumble, we heave, we make wild guesses as to what should be where and in which order and inevitably things go a bit awry and I laugh so hard and he grins slightly and we try something else and eventually we pull out some semblance of a farmette cohesion -- or at least in some small corner of it and we did that today: we moved the pea and bean trellis to the far sunny spot .





And now we have the whole planting season before us and much of it will be a failed effort, but so much more will be a wild success. Especially if you count the hours of hard work and the boisterous laughter. Do not forget to count the laughter.


In the evening I make chicken brats with local sauerkraut. And salad. It's the type of meal we'd have in the thick of summer. On the porch maybe. Not tonight. Not quite warm enough yet. But soon.