Saturday in the Twin Cities

Early Evening

Did I wear the young ones out today? The apartment is quiet...


 


They planned a day's worth of events and foods and ramblings and now, in the early evening, they're taking a nap upstairs, as if to conserve energy for the rest of my visit! Or is it that their week is long and the play weekend is short and it has to accommodate missed sleep from previous days?


What a full and beautiful day it has been!

From a delicious brunch at the French Hen Cafe (a name with such a good intertwining of two themes that seem to be running through my life right now)...






...to a walk along the grand Mississippi River (the grandest of natural wonders, don't you think? - my girl muses) and then to the dam that creates the pounding waterfall that surely proves her point...
















And, too, we side-step to the Polish Fest, right there, by the river. (So many Poles in the Twin Cities? Who knew!)



(Polish organic farmers)


Of course, it's all about the food here...



(typical fare: potato pancakes, kielbasa, pierogi, stuffed cabbage...)





(paczki -- doughnuts, filled with rose or plum jam)



...and the polka dancing...



(older)





(younger)



...but not only. (What thoughts are meandering through this woman's head, as she sits there in her wreath of flowers and her clothes of red and white?)






We linger for a while...











...then go further into the neighborhood, where my girl and her husband show me a truly Polish bar, a place, they say, where in the evenings, there is more polka dancing and singing too.  
Polish songs? I ask.  
More like 'Moon River'... she tells me, smiling.

We sip a Polish beer...






... then walk even deeper into the neighborhood, pausing at a Polish sausage store...






...where, in fact, you can also pick up (and I do!) Polish sauerkraut and a Polish herbal tea I like (Melysa)...






And that's not the end. We visit a cafe with good, strong coffee ('the Empire') and a delicious peach cake (I'll be baking one on Monday, just you wait!), and then still more: we go to an apple cider distillery ('Sociable Cider Werks'), where you can see the vats and sample the product (so add that to my list of beverage distilleries that I have now visited)...










...and now my favorite Twin Cities couple is plum tuckered out, but me, I'm so excited about being here and seeing the city through their eyes, that I sit back and take this moment to jot down a few notes and download a few photos, because I know that if I do any of this after dinner, I will be the one dozing off and it will take me one hour to write one sentences (which is what happened last night, hence the ridiculously late posting).


After Dinner

We eat our evening meal as a foursome -- with his mom who happens to be in town right now, at the terrific 112 Eatery. Aside from birthdays and weddings more recently, I never eat out in restaurants in lively configurations these days and so it is especially delightful to indulge in all the foods and accoutrements of a grand dining experience, where it's more than just me, or just Ed and me. 






And now its nearly over -- I'll have a Sunday morning and then puff! -- out I'll go, to become once more a more distant (but always so very eager!) participant in their lives. 
 

between meals

You could say that I am writing this between meals. There was breakfast (ah, how well I remember it!)...




(Is he grinning because he knows he'll get a break from morning photos for two days?)

And a lovely walk through the farmette yard, appreciating the strong show of annuals, especially now, in the full heat of August (note the expanding nasturtium and of course the cosmos)...






And then there will be dinner. Greatly anticipated, well planned, delicious sounding, happily reserved dinner, in Minneapolis.

Except, what's this? As I wait in Madison at the parking lot where the bus picks up riders, an email comes in on someone's iPhone from Megabus. Running late.

Geez Louise! Not JUST late. 1 hr. 45 min. late. Of course, if you know Megabus, you'll know that there are no comfortable waiting areas. You're on the curb. It works well, except when the bus is ultra late.

There is a big "I should have known" running through me. Last time I took this bus to the Twin Cities, it was two hours late getting there and four hours late coming back. And it was winter. The curb seemed like a cold and lonely place to wait.

The email notice tells us not to move far. The driver will try to make up some of the lost time. Fine, but it's hot and there is little shade. Some of the people leave. I go to a nearby Arby's with a view toward the stop.

And no sooner do I settle in with my computer and an iced tea than boom! The bus arrives. So not 1 hr. 45 min. late but only 45 min (at this point) late. Me, I'm happy. (My daughter obligingly calls the restaurant yet a third time to change the reservation. I can imagine her sweet voice -- no, not at 10:30 after all... yes, I know you're immensely busy and it's the weekend... now she's coming in not so late, but still late, so we can be there at 9:30...) Less happy will be those people who left the stop for a while.

And now what's this? We're not going to Minneapolis? Oh, we're going to downtown Madison first! Who knew. No wonder this trip takes six hours. Lord.

(This is the time that I think of trains zipping between points on other continents and sigh. We almost got a rail link to Minneapolis. Almost.)

And so the bulk of the post is written between meals. Breakfast, dinner. 'It ends with dinner. At Bar La Grassa, where I eat like a pig and indulge in that feeling of well being that comes when irksome details resolve themselves, as they so often do and life proceeds smoothly, lovingly forward.

Sleepers, Wake!

Walking through my flower beds on a brilliant August morning, seeing that final burst of glory from the last of the day lilies, what comes to my head is, of all things, Bach's Cantata 140, Wachet Auf! (Play it, as you read along!)

Here is one translation of the lyrics:

Wake, awake, for night is flying,
The watchmen on the heights are crying;
Awake, Jerusalem, at last!
Midnight hears the welcome voices,
And the thrilling cry rejoices:
Come forth, ye virgins, night is past!
The Bridegroom comes, awake,
Your lamps with gladness take;
Hallelujah!

(Catherine Winkworth, 1865)

In fact, my association is a tad off base. I look at the day lily and I think -- trumpet sounds! Sleepers wake! But Wachet Auf hasn't a trumpet in the score. French horn, yes. Trumpet, no.






The other inaccuracy is to suggest day lilies are trumpet lilies.  In the world of flowers, there really is such a thing as a fragrant trumpet lily, but this -- the day lily, my day lily, or more accurately, the hemerocallis -- is not it.






In fact, the day lily should not be called a day lily at all, since its proper classification isn't that of a lily, but let's not fuss. Old habits die hard and what I grow in abundance in my yard is traditionally referred to as a day lily.






And as for the music in my head, well, when you join the lyrics, the melody and the urgent call to a glorious awakening, you have before you my love of these day lilies today, as I see them raise their faces so briefly, yet so gallantly toward the heavens! So the association stands: sleepers, wake!






As you can tell, I get very transported by my flowers!






Even as I've relaxed when the cheepers march through these beds.






Nearly all my flowers survived the cheeper scratching habits and honestly, the hens and their protector are so sweetly non intrusive these days that I have nothing but good words to say about them all.

So, this day surely stands in contrast to yesterday. Though it shares that sublime morning ritual of breakfast on the porch...






...but then it takes its own direction, including some work in the garden, some solid porch reading time, a fairly good game of tennis, a trip to the local farmers market, a dinner of market and farmette odds and ends (including the ever wonderful brined by Ed garden pickles!)...






... and finally, the day ends with getting myself organized for a brief getaway tomorrow to visit my younger girl and her husband up in Minneapolis.

that kind of a day

I don't know if others do this, but I have a rather childish habit of wishing for flawless days and lumping all things unpleasant into others. Rather than spacing things out, I create your classic miserable day that has not much to show for it (relatively speaking, that is; my life right now is blessed with very few really miserable episodes).

Today was slated to be such a day.

And so of course I let Ed sleep -- may as well, right? -- and I get up at sunrise to open up the coop. I make my way to where we usually place a dish for the stray cat, Cammie, hoping she'd come around before the cheepers found her food. (She didn't and they found it eventually and ate it all. I hope salmon and turkey giblets agrees with their diet.)

I step out on the grass and boom! I get hit in the head with a crusading wasp or some such insect. It's been a long time since a stinging hornet or bee got tangled in my hair but this one did and I had a sore head from the sting for the rest of the morning.

On the upside, it was a pretty sunrise!






Breakfast was delightful too...






...albeit abbreviated because I had a dental appointment. Now, your classic miserable day should have a root canal scheduled for it. But how about this: my root canal, done some 18 months ago, never healed properly (it flares up especially when I travel, which is somewhat frightening, as you really do not want to go searching for a good endodontist on, say, the Isle of Islay, though perhaps they use whisky to dull the pain, which might have its virtues). So I was scheduled to have it redone. If you dislike root canals, you're going to especially dislike retreatments, which use pain as the barometer of what the problem might be. (How about now: does this hurt?)

On the upside, I really like my endodontist and we exchanged some good stories about life's transitions, especially those pertaining to our children.

Afterwards, you'd think I'd settle down to a pleasant session of reading and writing on the porch. The weather is just perfect for it! But first of all, I really don't much care for the book I'm reading (it's junky; I love books that are gripping, leave you with a pleasant feeling at the end of it all and are well written -- it's a surprisingly rare combination, considering how many books are published each year) and second of all, it's also a good day to do the side mowing. (Side mowing is what I call the mowing of places where the big mower wont reach.)

I haven't done this since prior to the wedding.  We have a lot of wood chips on the property and when I work the hand mower over chipped areas, I send the damn things flying in all directions, many of them my way. I always forget to put on long pants (and they would have to be pretty thick to withstand the attack) and so I get my legs banged up from flying chunks of wood. (If you zoomed in closely on my legs in photos from the wedding, you would have noticed the bruises. There were many and no, they did not heal in time.)

On the upside, I racked up a good number of steps on my stepping app while pushing the hand mower.

Now, I could have resumed writing. Or picked up another book. But no -- I decided to work on my travel budget for the remaining trips I have scheduled for this year. That's never a pleasant task because the imagination always exceeds available resources and so the job is to scale down and make do (for the remaining trips, I'll be staying mostly in rooms with kitchens, or at places that offer half board).

On the upside, working on trip budgets does remind me that I do have travel in my life and after my beloveds and the farmette, nothing thrills me more than thinking ahead to a trip. It's a thrill that even Ed, who knows me too well, fails to fully understand. [Conversation this morning: so why go away if you like it here now? And me, for the umpteenth time: I'm programmed that way. I loved it when I was a teen, I love it as an adult. Time will tell if I will love it when I am so old that can no longer fully hear or see my environment.]

And so long as we're doing unfavorite tasks, I tell myself, why not downsize my book collection some more? I set a goal of 40 books that I will be giving later in the day to the library. That's not especially unpleasant, although it was rather discouraging to see how many of these books had a bookmark stuck in the middle -- as in: I bought the book on impulse and it was not good enough to finish.
 
At some point though, I say to myself -- enough! Time to exhale a little. And I take a look at my flower beds...











...and I do sit down on the porch. On the not so upside, I declined politely the endodontist's offered Vicodin and so, of course, I suffer the consequences.

sultry Tuesday

What projects, you ask. What's lurking there, waiting for my attention? Of course, the ever unfinished book project. Long time Ocean readers might say -- you clearly don't have it in you to finish that one. Maybe it's not a good project for you?

But the truth is, I've come to like the leisurely pace of writing. The task of forming complete texts has never been my livelihood, my career, my professional path. Like travel, I've done it because I love doing it in its own right. True, I am past the halfway point and so it would be doubly pleasant to get closer to the end. I thought a year of retirement might do the trick, but now I know that it will take twice that and, most importantly -- it doesn't matter.

Other projects do include bringing the farmette even closer to an aesthetic that we like, that I like: empty the insides more and keep the external spaces -- so carefully tended for the wedding! -- under vigilant control. That's less fun, especially outdoors, especially now, in the buggy days of August. But I continue to put in my hours there because I wont quickly forget how hard it was to reign in the tremendous proliferation of superfluous growth. I must keep on top of it!

Other projects are percolating. They need time to rise to the surface. I haven't yet given them much attention. They're ideas. Dormant at that.  But I will get to them! One day I will!

In the meantime, it is a sultry, gray day. I push Ed out to do chicken duty just after sunrise, then feel guilty and follow shortly after to tidy up the coop.


After breakfast...






...we take the time to spray our cedar oil mix again around the farmhouse, because it really does keep us sane even as the bugs in other parts of the farmette are crazily active right now. Ed mists, I zap the mosquitoes with a paddle.

The cheepers watch and follow us around...
















Isis the cat runs away -- he hates it when we walk around with a mosquito zapper. And the little and big frogs (we have many of both) watch from their curious perches throughout the yard.






Typically, this would have marked the end of the active part of our day. But in thinking about weed and sapling growth, it strikes me that I could, we could clear out the corner of the barn where the cheepers' coop stands.


Two hours of pulling out saplings and weeds and slapping at mosquitoes and I feel that we have paid our dues.

I take a look at the best of the blooms (in my mind, anyway)...






...and I again retreat to the porch, for one last round of reading and writing.


 



It was a very good day. My phone tells me I barely took 7,000 steps. Dumb stepper app. I feel I ran a marathon with a potato sack on my shoulders. Yep, a really good day.

rain?

Maybe because we still occasionally mist a little cedar oil around the entrance to the farmhouse. Or maybe it's that I keep the area well trimmed. Or maybe it's that once they found better digs, our mosquitoes decided to set up shop elsewhere. For whatever reason -- we have far fewer bugs around the farmette structures than, say, out in the open fields.

So that when I stood at dawn, admiring the sunrise (yes, yet again Ed slept through the cheepers' wake up and release hour), I was sufficiently bothered by mosquitoes there, that I did not linger.






I did some spot pruning early in the day, but not a lot. I worried that I would have to water the remaining flower beds later on and so I held back on gardening. To conserve enthusiasm for it.

Everything is so dry and the forecasters tell us that we only have a slight chance for rain -- today, if at all. Though in general, I rather love working in the garden, it does suck up the hours of a day rather quickly and I do want to move on to other projects. I've been stuck on the same routines since I've come back from Europe and everything else is growing cobwebs and collecting dust balls.

What morning photos do I have? Let me start with this little group: it's as if the wild and free has a close encounter with the elegant and sublime!






In general, it's been too cool this year for a boisterous lavender crop, but the plants are still trying to keep their spirits and stalks up. Take a look at the bushes that line the driveway:






This is a small bed that I completely neglect on Ocean (it's not as photogenic as the ones facing the courtyard) but it is one that everyone sees when they come to the farmhouse. In addition to the lavender, there are these guys:






One more note on the morning activities at the farmette: the white hen has recovered! She is laying again and her appetite and energy level have returned!






Phew! Enough wondering around outside. Breakfast time!






And later, there's a lucky break: the thin band of thundershowers passing over the state today? It comes straight at us and we have a nice, prolonged dousing of the farmette lands from above, without human intervention!

The cheepers don't like it and the mosquitoes probably view it as an opportunity to massively reproduce, but I am happy that we have added some nourishment to all things bright and beautiful. Even if it all looks a bit damp and gray for the afternoon. (As seen from the porch just now.)

Sunday

Sleepless night for both of us, though for different reasons. I'm thinking forward thoughts, he's preoccupied with a machining project. And so he sleeps through the chicken wake up time. I go out and open the coop.

Sunrise!






Retreat to sleep. And now we try for another start to the day. More coordinated. We clean the farmhouse. A real scrub down. It always makes me happy to see it refreshed!

A mini breakfast on the porch. Not a big meal. We have brunch plans! Just a small nibble now.






And now the celebration of my girl's birthday begins for me: we meet her and her husband downtown and we have a terrific meal together. Nothing feels more urban and out of the ordinary for me than a brunch out. It's a good way to fall into a festive frame of mind.






But after, Ed and I return to our old Sunday habits. I work in the yard (it's so dry! two hours spent on watering the new flower bed!). Ed naps. Presumably making him more alert for more machining work tonight.
















Ah, but then we regroup and come together again. Because my birthday girl and her husband are at the farmhouse for supper too. The pleasure of two meals in one day with them!

I set it it out on the porch...






A simple meal. Nothing extraordinary. Pasta with a homemade sauce. But it has "birthday" written all over it.





Which means gifts. Clothes for a bigger belly. And cookbooks!





And the rhubarb strawberry cake for dessert. Which a commenter asked about and let me tell you -- it has been immensely popular here, at the farmhouse, so I am happy to pass on the recipe. (You'll notice that the positioning of the fruit is entirely different here than in my past two cakes.)  Such a grand Sunday! For you as well, I hope.

Rhubarb Strawberry Pudding Cake (Gourmet, 2007)

1/4 c water
1 1/2 tsp cornstarch
1/3 c plus 1/2 c sugar
2 c chopped fresh rhubarb stalks (I used a little more)
1 c. chopped fresh strawberries (again, a tiny bit more)
1 c flour
1 3/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
1/2 c whole milk
1 stick unslated butter, melted and cooled slightly
1 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 400.
Butter an 8 inch square glass or ceramic baking dish (I used regular cake pan)
Stir water, cornstarch and 1/3 c sugar in saucepan, then stir in rhubarb. Bring to simmer stirring constantly, then simmer, stirring occasionally, 3 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in strawberries.

Whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and remaining 1/2 c sugar in a bowl.

Whisk together egg, milk, butter and vanilla in large bowl, then whisk in flour mixture until just combined.

Reserve about 1/2 c fruit mixture, then add remainder to baking dish and pour batter over it (in my case -- I needed to distribute it evenly, as batter certainly wasn't a "pourable" consistency), spreading evenly. Drizzle reserved 1/2 c of fruit over batter. Bake until wooden pick comes out clean, 25 - 30 minutes (I baked it for 32 mins). Cool in pan on rack for 5 minutes before serving.