Saturday

I came back to a fuller, loftier arc of the sun. I can tell. That and the lighter evenings thanks to the added Daylight Savings hour, truly make me feel I'd been away far longer -- at least half a season!

So when the predicted high today was to be only 35, I wondered -- why am I so resistant to going outdoors? A month ago, 35 would have seemed like a godsend!

Maybe it's because we got off to a cloudy start. (So breakfast was in the front-room).






And after, when Ed and I went outside to survey the front entrance to the farmhouse (we never use it: the frame has rotted and the steps crumbled many many years ago), we didn't linger. It felt nippy. [We're considering different ways to rebuild the front: leading ideas all center around the concepts of easy and cheap, while not straying too far from the integrity of the house.]

But, my perspective changed when the sun broke through and the birds came out.






We are seeing a lot of birds outside now.





A lot.

It was easy to interrupt indoor activities then and reach for the clippers to work on trimming the hugely overgrown hydrangea. And to carry fallen maple limbs away from the front yard. "Thirties" means not a whole lot when there is sunshine.

Inside, too, I've come to appreciate the higher arc of the sun's passage. The kitchen, where lately I do my writing, is ablaze with light now with the glass porch roof. Northern exposure notwithstanding, we're getting a delicious amount of blue skies and streaming sunshine.






And yet, I'm waiting for the really great days: when the last of the ice melts and the first crocuses come out. We're not there yet.

*****

P.S. In response to a commenter, here's my two zlotys (Polish currency) on the subject of beet soup: what I made pretty much tracks the recipe of someone who comes from the south of Poland. I mention this because recipes for beet soup are very personal and always change across the regions of the country. What I especially like about this one is that 1. it's easy, 2. it has the unexpected surprise of chicken, which is great when you're trying to make a meal of just soup.
So, Ocean author's tweak on a highlander's classic borstch:

- Take a big pot, fill it half way with water, add peeled beets. I used 6 medium beets and I chopped them into half inch slices before cooking. Hands turn pink, but so what.
- Also add chicken drumsticks. I added three.
- Boil for about 45 minutes (covered).
- Remove drumsticks, take meat off the bone, chop up and reserve.
(- at this point my friend purees the beets and water; I do not because Ed likes chunky soup)
- to beets and broth add chopped up potatoes (I used 3) and carrots (I used three and that was too much) and celery. Add more water.
- cook until done -- maybe another 20 minutes.
- return meat to broth and season (dill, salt, pepper).
(- she also adds Polish sausage, fried up a bit and chopped in at the end, and she serves the soup with sour cream. I skip the sausage and just throw on top a dollop of yogurt).

Friday

Again I am grateful for all your Ocean comments during my time away these past three weeks. As you can tell, I'm only a half-hearted hermit. The other half loves the back and forth and I surely profited from all your thoughts and reactions to various posts. Thank you so, so much.

Back home, the farmette is slowly emerging from hibernation. True, it's hard to love the last weeks of March: everything is so dismally brown, muddy, uninviting. When we walk the land, we see animal dropping everywhere. Deer have yet again attempted a complete destruction of our new orchard (only partly successful -- predictably, in places where we didn't provide enough cover for the young trees). The old barn has lost a few more boards and animals have dug trenches inside.

Truly, the whole place looks terrible.


So let me roll back to the prettiest part of the day: the morning. I catch the sunrise (more or less), behind the old orchard. It's warm enough that I can go outside without dressing for it.











And inside, at breakfast time, the sun is pouring in. The pots of annuals that I brought in for the winter have revived: they're flowering again. So much so that I snipped some of the blooms for our breakfast table.











A good part of the day is spent on restocking the refrigerator. And after, Ed and I take baby steps toward the pre-spring outdoor cleanup. Sweeping, righting felled tree protectors -- little things. But significant: they usher in spring.






Isis joins us. Somewhat reluctantly. He is less happy with the amount of wet ground at every turn.






Evening. It's time to resume cooking duties at the farmhouse. So what to make on my first night back in the kitchen? Beet soup. From a recipe handed to me by someone from Poland. Is there ever a time when you come back from a trip without changing your habits somewhat upon your return? No, I don't think so.

back home

Call it what you want: first day of spring, the UN International Happiness Day (it's true!), me, I'll call it the day of being home again.

Such a long but easy trip! Think of all the things that can go wrong here: a cab taking you at 4:30 a.m. to the airport, a flight taking off on a misty cold morning in Warsaw, connecting to a 9 hour flight to Chicago where, too, it's misty cold, though not as cold as when I left. Finally, a bus ride to Madison.

Nothing went wrong. Each flight came in ahead of schedule. The transatlantic Delta flight was half empty and the three men in the cockpit came on to reassure any jittery passenger that, between them, they had 80,000 miles of experience (unspoken subtext: we can handle emergencies!). I watched three movies in succession and slept through half of another. And the plane came in not at 3:30 as scheduled, but at 3:05. I walked through immigration and customs fast enough that I could take the airport train and still be on the 3:30 bus to Madison.

How is that for a trouble free journey!

Back home. It was an especially poignant return. Ed was out fetching dinner and Isis was out at the sheep shed and still, I felt so completely welcomed. May as well have had horns blowing and confetti flying -- home.

It's always interesting to survey things afresh the next morning -- what plants complained, what snow has remained.

So after breakfast -- yes, gloriously in the sunroom, with a cooperative Ed (imagine: three weeks of no one bugging him with a camera!) --






...I went out to look at the yard. And it became obvious that the snow we'd been pushing off the porch roof found a happy home just below. Meaning we'd created a mountain of snow in the northern shadows of the farmhouse and if I wanted the plants to awaken anytime soon, I would do well to move some of the snow out of there.

So my first task on this first day of spring/UN Happy Day is to shovel.






In the evening I have my monthly meeting with retired or nearly retired UW friends and even though I am feeling quiet tonight, it still feels nice to be embroiled in the pattern of regularity again.

Warsaw and beyond

Each time I come to Warsaw, I encounter something that surprises me. A new block of buildings, beautiful bathrooms in hotels and private homes, efficiently programmed public buses -- on and on. Change here, while not as rapid as, say, in China, is still very much in the air.

Of the things that do not surprise me, what stands out is the explosion of independent coffee houses. The cafe culture in Warsaw has always been good. Families lived in cramped housing. Often you would take your social life outside. Long walks if the weather is good, but as you know, the weather often is not good. Cafes thrived. I spent many hours engaged in conversations with friends in the smokey, still air of Warsaw cafes. (Tea was then the drink of choice.)

In the last handful of years, there have been so many exciting new additions to the cafe scene that I really am quite overwhelmed. I would say that cafe life here is not only better than anywhere in the States, but -- hold your breath for this one -- it's better than in Paris. Sure, there are more cafes in Paris. But in Warsaw, quality makes up for quantity (and quantity isn't so bad either).

You may remember in my first set of days in Warsaw, I tried several new places that were just wonderful: one small, one larger, each unique, with a twist, encouraging you to stay. And yesterday I discovered the fantastic Ministry of Coffee. This morning I found (through my new funky guidebook) a place just around the corner from my apartment: a cafe-bookstore called (in translation) Upheaval in the World. It's affiliated with the Institute of Reportage and the Center for Nonfiction Culture. If I lived in Warsaw, I would spend days here.

The space is all about the world of nonfiction. Their motto comes from the renowned historian, journalist, photographer, traveler --  Kapuscinski:  everyone knows very little about everything.






I didn't come with a laptop, but I see that in most of these places, there'll always be a few people clicking away. Sometimes in discussion with another person who will also be refering to something on the Internet. The cafes are always very wired and I use them to check my iPhone email throughout the day.

I have breakfast here and I decide to get back on something resembling normality: coffee and yogurt with fruit and granola. Well, and carrot cake. It was a free slice, so I took it.






In many ways, I'm the outlier at these places. The crowd is 99% young -- my daughters' ages. Twenties and thirties.

And there's a reason for it: these people are the champions of the new Poland. The creative force behind modernity. The artists, writers, designers. You can tell that these are their meeting places.

Missing are the people my age.

And never, never have I come across people even older than me, even though, ostensibly, they have the time to frequent these rather upscale cafes.

When I met my friend for coffee yesterday, we both reflected on certain privileges of our generation. And we agreed on this: it's the generation before us that got screwed in Poland. My father's generation (I mention my father rather than my mom as she spent her youth in the States). Their childhood -- in prewar Poland -- came at a time of economic instability. And then came the war. Complete destruction of everything. You either lost what you had or you moved further from ever having anything again. War took it all.

Except hope. After the war, they lived on hope. The West is so smug about the failure of "communism" (if you want to call it that) in the Eastern block, but in the early postwar years, I don't think "failure" was in the minds of those who survived.

They built for us, the children born to them, the schools that made us bookish, the hospitals that kept us alive and then, damn it, they got the knocks and punches: from the West, from the East and worst -- from inside their own ranks. And so again, for that generation, there was a feeling of loss.

And when the market economy and the EU stepped in to run the show now, it was too late for those just upwards of my age. Their income would not grow. They would watch the stores pop up, the borders open, yet they, the ones who suffered from all the upheavals, they would, for the most part, be the outsiders, gawking at it from behind the barricade of their age.

Screwed, I tell you. They lived through the worst of times.


After breakfast, I ride the metro to the end of the line in the north. A school group comes on, bright coats and packs flashing colors that were hard to come by after the war (I don't know why: something about the dyes not being very good).






To these kids, there is only the Poland they encounter now. Everything else belongs to the textbook. Maybe their lives will be calmer than those of their parents and grandparents. It's perhaps a cliche, but nonetheless such a true one: I belong to the transition. They are the new Poland.






At the last metro stop, just at the edge of the city, my university friend (the one I hadn't seen for forty years) is waiting for me. He and his wife had spent some years in the States and they commented how forests in America don't smell the same as the ones in Poland. I agreed. And so on their invitation, I am now visiting a village that is really sort of a suburb except that it's not, because suburbs are not a Polish concept -- anyway, I visit this hamlet where actually several of my friends now live. They have beautiful homes and lovely lives and art figures prominently in their everyday (we studied economics together. Who knew that they were sculptors at the side!) and it is all rather reassuring. They made the profitable choices. It reminds me of a kid jump rope song that I learned in New York: tenement for rent, inquire within, when I jump out, you jump in. In my generation, for everyone who succeeded, there are plenty of those who did not.

They live at the edge of a vast national park -- Puszcza Kampinowska. It's a forest -- a beautiful forest, like the forests of my childhood, with mushroom clumps growing, I'm sure, after a rainfall and with tall tall birches pushing toward the sky, in competition with the pines. Only in Poland have I seen birches this tall.






We walk the trails -- the three who live in the area and me, the interloper now, the one who is only here for this one last day before heading out tomorrow.






For lunch, they invite me to a local pierogi place (with the unPolish name of Lemon Tree). I follow their lead and order the ones with the meat, with beet-toned dough and bits of lard on top. This is the real deal. This is an aspect of old Poland that few want to let go of.






And then I leave them to their lives. As I get a lift to the metro line I ask the friend who spent some years in the States (he worked for the World Bank) if they ever considered staying there. Briefly, he tells me. But after all, at the end of the day, what would you have there? A house, a yard...

Funny, that's exactly how I view their lives here: they came back to a (very lovely) house and a yard.

It's at this point that I feel so Midwestern-Wisconsinite that I almost want to hide. My farmette is only the pretext for a life that I love so much back home.


And now I am in Warsaw again and everything conspires to mix up the old and the new for me at every turn, every step. Here's an intersection that says it all: prewar, post-war, recent -- they all, right now, coexist. But for how long?






I keep walking. Oh! I'm passing a street named after the poet Baczynski -- remember him from yesterday?






A block later, the street is named after Winnie the Pooh!






Yes, Warsaw had learned how to mix up the metaphors, the symbols, all scrambled in a bizarre way and yet... so very familiar.

It's five. I have a tiny bit of time left. It appears that my apartment is steps away from the Chopin Museum.





It's a new museum -- supported by EU funds. Interactive. You could spend hours playing with the technology at the various stations. I'm overwhelmed. It's too much. You can't just walk through. Here you'll find a segment on his childhood, in another spot -- on his first folk inspired Mazurka compositions, then a segment on the women in his life (from mother, to George Sand), I mean, it just goes on and on and there is music for you to listen to at each point and it's just too much for me right now. With the Polonaise pounding in my head, I leave.

But I didn't fully let go. I signed up for a seminar scheduled for later that evening on "the Myths and Realities of Chopin's Life." And, too, I noted another seminar at the cafe bookstore for even later tonight  -- on Photography and the Widow. I want to go to that as well.

What am I thinking???

I have a taxi coming at 4:30 a.m. and a bag to pack and a supper to eat somewhere... There's no time for seminars today!

My friends suggested a place where I can have a great borstch. I peer inside. Very nice. Folk art throughout, Traditional dishes.

But maybe that ought not be my end point? I had a traditional lunch. Let me try something new. I dig out my funky guide book. There's a place just a few blocks away called Dog or Bitch. It's a cafe (daytime) bar (evenings) and it offers some foods -- waffles pieces, with cheese, with egg, with this, with that.

I find it. A touch hidden, in a courtyard. When I asked for directions, no one had heard of it and even the street name provoked puzzled frowns. But I find it. (Their symbol reminds you a little of Target, no?)






I go inside. My immediate reaction is  -- eh, this isn't me. Too modern. Everyone is in black (guests and servers).






But wait, I'm in black too. I hesitate. A server asks me if I need help with something. I respond in Polish (I swear it was in Polish! At least I think it was in Polish!) -- I'm just looking around. There is a dog themed art gallery. Of kitchy stuff. He leaves me to my devices. I look.

What the hell, I decide to sit down.

I'm given a menu. Or at least I am given a tablet and on it there is a menu and it takes the server three separate times to get me on board with flipping through the various drinks and nibbles on the tablet. In the end, I can't quite get myself to order their proposed "winter" coctails (they'll start a spring menu as ingredients start to pour in from the next season). Too potent. I have an early flight. I can't drink heavy stuff the night before. So I ask for something lighter, wine based. I give a hint -- maybe along the lines of an Aperol Spritz?

He fires up a drink. He tastes, he adds from this bottle, from the next, he stirs, he shakes and he trims it with white stuff that I swear looks like (ugh!) whipped cream.





It is outstanding.

What's that white stuff? -- I ask. It definitely is not whipped cream (thank God).
Oh, a bit of vodka and simple syrup and lime, turned into foam.

I order food, too. Polish themed: their waffle comes with three additions: goat cheese, beets (!) and garlic emulsion.






And he mixes another drink -- again based on wine, but with bitters and with Polish this and Polish that and ground violets sprinkled on top. Phenomenal.





But here's the thing: we're speaking English. How did that happen?! Did they respond to me in English? Or did I forget myself and ask something in that language? Woah.... I want to be home alright.

I chat with the bartender for a while. Easy to do this: the place is not crowded. First question -- is it hard to get Poles to appreciate your creations? (In my mind, Poles don't savor alcoholic beverages; they down them).
He admits that it is. He says London has the greatest mixology bars right now (followed by New York). Poland is only coming around to considering it. But he is optimistic! Here he is, a young man born in the old textile (once upon a time) city of Lodz, creating amazing drinks in Dog and Bitch. I mean, you have to marvel. And, too, his English is excellent. I almost want to tell him to slow down -- he talks too fast for my aging sensibilities.
Where did you learn English? -- I ask.
Sweden. 
Well of course. Where my sister is right now, speaking Swedish, or maybe English, certainly not Polish, or maybe?

He encourages me to try another, but I've reached my limit. I tell him I'll send all my friends to this place. He's thinking American friends. I'm thinking -- well, no one actually. My daughters and their friends. Except, they're in the Midwest.

I walk home. Past the street of all streets...






And as it happens, past the Institute of Reportage, where the seminar on photographing widows is taking place. I peer in.






A guy steps out, probably for a cigarette.
Go in, he urges, go in! They just started!
No no. Gotta go...

At the apartment, I squeeze everything, everything (including my mom's china tea set) into my little suitcase.

I can't believe that in just a handful of hours, I'll be home.

2014, so far

It's almost amusing how this year has stumbled along: three weeks at the farmette, then three weeks overseas. Then three weeks at the farmette, followed by three weeks overseas. It wasn't intentional. Circumstances conspired to compact my travels in this way.

But now I'm ready to go home. I want my farmette life back again.

In keeping with the tradition of travel, I'll wrap my last day abroad into the travel day and come up with a story for you tomorrow. I leave at 4 in the morning and and I do not have time to post more than this brief note. With three teaser photos from today. The rest will come tomorrow.

I am so eager to watch spring arrive at home. Soon. So soon.



(the Kampinos forest outside Warsaw)





(ocean author at funky Warsaw cafe-bar)





(you know what this is; with a huge ad for something or other to the side)

a day in Warsaw

My friend gave me a book last night. It's about Warsaw (title: Get Your Head Around the City) and I let it be my guide today. Let's look together to see what the new Warsaw is all about. From the perspective of that generation that would never call itself "post-war." More like "post-communism."

First -- a place for breakfast. The book shuns the popular Old Town cafes that line the street just a few steps from where I'm staying. Those are locked in an older tradition. The new spots are tucked in blocks you'd never think to explore. So, good bye to the neoclassical-styled buildings that line this segment of the Royal Route for now.





I cut across to Marszalkowska Street. And I notice now how the traffic patterns -- auto and pedestrian alike -- have changed since I was a kid. Most anyone would say that this is the defining street of the city. This is where you'll find the Palace of Culture:






But, note those buildings cropping up toward the rear. The city now extends itself along the east-west corridor as well. Marszalkowska fizzles as you move away from the hub here. As you head south, the traffic lessens and the streets empty out. None of the fashionable boutiques/hotels are on the southern end. That shift, to me, is palpable. The blocks close to where I once lived -- once the real heart of the city now seem strangely forlorn.






But I continue onto this last stretch of Marszalkowska. Here, in an obscure building (one I know because an old friend once lived here), at the heels of an old church, there is a new cafe where they say coffee matters. They named it the Ministry of Coffee.






I'm in the thick of the new center of the Warsaw hipster culture. Laid-back, edgy, arty, at once sophisticated and preferring off-theater, off-art, the less known, less followed. I enter the cafe. It has simple lines. Sleek but comfortable. I select a raspberry jam croissant and a "good" cappuccino.






The place starts to fill. Young. it feels young. Twenties young. Confident young. These people have choices. They also have iPhones and Apple computers. Is being a hipster synonymous with being well off?





And since I am in my old neighborhood and soon standing before my old high school, I think back to those years where no one had anything. True, parents may have worried about the lack of quality foods, quality washing machines, cars, clothes, but we didn't care. We lived with the freedom of not caring about money. At all. Because it couldn't buy anything we needed or wanted. It was an unusual time to be reaching adulthood: everything that was important was personal. Friends, lovers, school. Family for some. Nature. Walks. Hikes. Music, art. Very long conversations. I think that about wraps it up. Nothing else mattered. At all.

This generation is different. Later, as I spend a long while over a cup of coffee with my closest of all my Polish friends, I listen to her talk about the worries, the stresses facing kids today. Raised by harried and hassled parents, chasing something else now: financial success. Too little time for family, for friends, for all that was solid and easy for us.


I walk on. My book tells me that a building facing Plac Unii Lubelskiej (just a block away from my high school) is called The Iron. The description points out the resemblance to the Flatiron in Manhattan. Which came first?






I walk now past the place of birth of a famous Polish poet -- Krzysztof Baczynski. Born in 1921, died during the Warsaw Uprising. That would be 1944. He was a few years older than my father, but his history reads like my father's history: pulmonary illness at a young age. Attended Batory Lycee. Joined the Gray Legion -- a youth movement that worked to sabotage the occupation of Poland. But my father lived. Baczynski died. Only because he gave his poems to a friend living outside Warsaw, did they survive the war and the almost complete destruction of the city.

You, my silent sadness,
the sadness of small stars,
I sought you, called you forth,
took you in my arms...  (Baczynski, 1942, translated by Kurczaba))



I abandon my guidebook for a while. I know these blocks too well. Let me walk along favorite routes and, too, pick up lunch at a funky eatery friends showed me some years back. It does have a fatal flaw -- it's not too far from the American Embassy and, too, the Warsaw Sheraton. I hear more English inside than Polish. Still, I have a good meal that has so many beet components to it that I think surely I've paid homage to this root vegetable that I used to hate, but now love -- a vegetable that is almost more Polish than cabbage or a potato.  So, beet soup, beet pickles to nibble on and baked goat cheese on a bed of arugula and... beets.






And would you believe it! I've written pages and pages without once mentioning the weather! Even as it is the windiest of days -- so blustery that the clouds come and go faster than it takes to cross the street.






I'm in the Old Town neighborhood again. It's late afternoon and my friend and I meet at Blikle Pastry Shop for our coffee. That's a Polish institution: known for high quality baked goods. Paczki. Honey cakes and poppyseed cakes. Cheesecake. It's right on the Royal Way. You've seen this street before. You'll see it again. I never tire of photographing it -- the colors change with the time of day and with the change in atmospheric conditions. Which today are a constant ebb and flow of clouds.






And even though my friend and I saw each other (at the dinner at her house) just a day ago, this is the time to talk. For a long, long time.






And now I'm calm again. We walk out into the violent wind, but it doesn't feel cold. It feels spring-like, as if it's wiping clean an old slate of stale weather. We head north along the Royal Route.






All the way to the Royal Square of Old Town.






And here, she turns toward her homeward path and I turn toward mine and this is the way it is: at some point, we go our separate ways.


I want to show you a monument that I pass right about now: it's of Nike, dedicated to the Heroes of Warsaw who died  between 1939 and 1945. It stands now at the main artery that links the eastern side of Warsaw across the river with the central western side.






It's a familiar monument to all of us who grew up here. I never fail to pause when I see it. East - West, South - North. Divisions that once mattered. Do they still?


And now I'm back along the Royal Route and the sun is long gone, even as the buildings retain the warm tones of the late day...







I pause at home, but not for long. I still need dinner and I'm with my friend's guide book again, walking down to the district by the river -- another corner of central Warsaw that often escapes those who visit the city. There's a botega here called, of all things, BTW. That's about as "new Poland" as it gets. I order a salad with rolled chicken thighs and it's good, very good, new Poland good. No cream sauce, just a few potatoes with a lighter, yogurt dressing.





You never tire of drawing these kinds of comparisons. Old, new. Recent, traditional. Funky western, seeped in memory.

I walk up the hill through an empty park. It's safe at night on the streets of Warsaw. May it always remain that way.

I eat a slice of poppyseed cake at home. Covered with raisins and orange rind.