before the storm

I hate to look forward to a storm, but really, it's been far too long without rain. The drizzle that keeps British gardens in line just isn't the norm here and it's not unusual to have hot dry spells like we've had this summer. Gardens don't like them. Farmers don't like them. I suppose the one upside is that it keeps the mosquito population at bay. Still, let's forget about the mosquitoes: we need the rain.

I tell Ed (with a touch of optimism) that the good weather will be with us only in the early morning hours.

We eat a lovely breakfast (forget the shirt: it's what's within that counts!)...






I spot check the flower beds...











And when after all that the skies remain a hazy blue, I go for a walk.






It's such a simple thing in the summer! You decide to walk, you go out, you walk. No preparation, no bracing for the cold gust of air, no path to clear of snow or ice. Prairie flowers are at their best in late summer...






... and there are always surprises: like the wild gaura I find blooming at the edge of the creek. I bust my knuckles to get gaura to repeat itself year after year in my garden and here it is, growing like crazy without intervention!





Alright. I feel the rains can come now.

I stay on the porch, writing, editing. The farmette waits with anticipation...





But the storms do not come. Not now, not in the afternoon, not in the evening. We have a lovely game of tennis before supper and still -- no rain.

(For supper I saute some shrimp and cook up a pot of ratatouille. Ed does not especially like zucchini. I'm trying to make a convert out of him.)






Evening. Still warm. They say now the storms will come past midnight. Well maybe. Or maybe I'll wake up to a dry landscape once more and I'll have to put my faith in the next set of days. Hot days at that. Summer came in with pounding rain. It's choosing a different path for its grand finale.

Sunday

For me at least, writing is like exercise -- the more I make time for it, the more I want to increase the number of hours I devote to it. If my book writing thrives, I am anxious to update Ocean and spend some time here as well (just as when I biked and walked, I was eager to play tennis too).

And today I finally, finally felt enough on top of life's tasks and chores, that after doing a semi thorough farmhouse cleaning, and after a wonderfully protracted breakfast...





...I took out my book project again. Of course, since it's been a while, I had to start by reading (and improving) it. The final draft, if there ever is a final draft, will have been revised probably close to a hundred times. All these years of writing have made me terribly fussy about sentences, paragraphs, chapters.

And still, I am eager to move forward. And there is no better time than now, when the garden beckons me for snatches of time, but never for too long...



(four and twenty black birds...)




(facing the farmhouse)


...and I am content as anything to sit back on the porch and to dive into the text that has been on my mind now for too many years (decades?). Time to get it out and move on to the next thing.


I did pause after a few hours -- dinner preparations for our Sunday meal are not hugely time consuming, but I did feel it was time to bake another cake - mixing this time raspberries and peaches and borrowing bits and pieces from various recipes to create a cake that would speak to the season and, too, would make do with ingredients I have at home. (For example kefir instead of buttermilk.)



(a quick taste with a cup of coffee, as the tomato sauce percolates)


My daughter and husband are here, the air is pleasantly warm, the summer progresses in the most beautiful way and I try not to notice that this weekend we've turned the corner: we're in the second half of August. Not many weeks left when I can live with windows wide open all day and all night.




I'm appreciating every last bit of it!

hot Saturday

You may read this variously. For example -- hot Saturday! what was she up to?? But I mean nothing more than to say that for once, the day felt very warm, from beginning 'til end. As it should be on a weekend in mid-August.

The garden suddenly feels dry. Oh, I've been spot watering places that seem to especially need it, but in a way, I've given up. It's maintenance work, but it's not going to make it feel lush anymore. Many of the flowers surely feel robust, but things are drying around the edges.





For our animals, it's too warm. Oreo's tail is drooping.






Isis walks up the farmhouse path cautiously, always with an eye toward the cheepers, wanting to be inside now, where it's cooler (and where there are no cheepers). Flowers with red or orange in them dominate.





Breakfast feels pleasantly warm. I picked the last of the strawberries -- you see them in the little dish. They deserve special mention because we had so few this year! (Thanks, chipmunks.)






I have a date to walk to the farmers market with my pregnant daughter (nearly halfway toward the birth day!) and I decide to push myself a bit more and bike to her place. Not far -- just six miles if I take the bike path, past our neighboring farmers...






...and prairie fields.






And of course, by the time I arrive at her home, I am hot. I pause at her place, refreshed by a glass of cold water and a quick visit with the two new adoptees.






(She reminds me that their older cat needs a photos as well!)






And then we set out. Lakeside walk, very very pretty now in August -- calling forth memories of this spring, when the ice cover refused to melt.






And of course, the market: full of the flowers that my girl especially likes. None of this tame pink white blue and yellow that I so associate with May. We're talking vibrant ruby red, purple and gold!






Walk back, bike home. Lunch on the porch. Water the big flower bed. Very warm.

So you'd think that this would be enough, right? Needed movement checked off. Photos taken, flowers admired and tended. But no! It turns out in life that the more you move, the more you want to move some more, so I coax Ed into a game of tennis (it doesn't take much -- we both love to play) and that, too, is very warm. Delightfully so.

Supper foods for a warm summer evening (and I say warm, because it's not so hot that we feel the need for air conditioning)? Oh, nothing special at all. A chicken brat day with lots of market corn. I never feel like fussing in the kitchen on a day like this.

Oh, but I do love these summer days! So very much!

it's Friday...

Restless nights don't always lead to restless days but they surely increase the likelihood of an appearance of one. A further contributing factor (to a restless day) may be to have scheduled for it yet another visit with the endodontist (the same one who last week retreated a root canal for me).

But first, before all this, there is breakfast -- that wonderful meal that this morning required a jacket. It was that cool. (For me, not for Ed.)





The endodontist -- an incredibly talented and wise man, has seen far too much of me lately, especially since the last half dozen visits have been freebies. (He feels compelled to fix this tooth at the set initial price, even though we've gone mountains over that piddly first set of hours.)

Well now, if you come here this often, we'll run out of family milestones to talk about. I already know about your daughter's wedding and your older girl's pregnancy -- he smiles, but not very broadly.
Let's try a different topic -- how's your weekend shaping up?
I think about how I should answer this. I don't really have a week-end anymore. The only thing that makes a weekend a weekend is that my older girl and her husband typically come over for supper on Sunday. So I know then that it's a Sunday.

The endodontist comments -- reminds me of my friend who just retired. His wife asks him -- what are going to do today and he pauses and answers -- nothing. And she asks him -- so what are you going to do tomorrow and he answers -- I haven't finished doing nothing today yet!

I laugh, but were I not with all forms of paraphernalia in my mouth I'd explain that it isn't really like that. I do have things on my plate and each day I make small progress and get closer to picking them up again. It would help if I didn't have to spend so many mornings at the endodontist -- I want to say.


After, I do the weekly grocery shopping and by the time that's behind me -- boom! It's afternoon.

I water the garden contemplatively, thinking about whether I should put the motor on and get to my projects.

And I decide I'm going fast enough. Your sense of time changes when you retire: a packed day may be the bees knees for some, but for me, if there's no time to leisurely pick up a book (for example), then I feel I've crammed in too much.


In the evening we play tennis. A good game. Relaxed. Unhurried. Why should it be otherwise...

Thursday

I watch this day fill up, starting from zero -- nothing planned, nothing expected, then slowly, as if I let the hose on and point it into a wheelbarrow and within minutes, it becomes full (I say this because in the afternoon, I actually do fill a wheelbarrow -- to water the strawberry hydrangea out front).

It begins early. At sunrise. Or just minutes before. Ed insists he's up for letting the cheepers out, but instead of rolling over and succumbing to delicious morning sleep, I think -- wouldn't it be nice to see the sun come up over the lake again? I haven't chased a sunrise in a long long time. It's a clear morning. Why not do it now?

And the minute I pull Rosie (the moped) out onto the road, I remember how stupid it is to go out like this without properly pulling on warm clothing. It's in the low fifties this morning. On a moped -- it feels really really cold.

Never mind. No time to go in for an extra jacket. It's nearly six. Sunrise happens around now and once the summer sun breaks through the horizon, its climb is brilliant and rapid. And so I continue and just as I pull up to the shore, I witness that beautiful moment, right there over Lake Waubesa when night is no longer night.






Satisfied (and cold), I leave the lake, awed by how quickly that speck of orange becomes a ball of golden fire...






...and I turn back to do my rural loop home.

Past cornfields...






...onwards, with deer crossing my path and two sandhill cranes standing, watching...






...while wispy strands of morning mist still touch the fields around us.






Oh, I'm so cold now! I pull up the farmette driveway, past the old orchard that always looks so good just after sunrise...





...and into the farmette courtyard, noting that the cheepers are out and about and Ed is in the sheep shed already, working on his latest machining project.

At the farmhouse, I bury myself deeply under the quilt --  but it's no good. Still cold. Not until much later, when I stand under a hot shower do I let the morning chill leave me and I feel like I am waking to a summer day again.

Though the "waking" part comes rather late.

And the breakfast part comes even later, since just when I'm ready to get going, Ed comes back to take a morning nap.

It is nearly 11 by the time we take our morning meal out onto the porch.






And shortly after, I am ever so happy to meet up with my Albuquerque friend -- she is in town and she has a window and that window is right now and so out comes Rosie again and off I go downtown. It's been only two months, but it always feels like life has taken so many shifts and turns since our last encounter. Time to catch up!






And then I am back at the farmette, but not for long. After rolling that water filled wheelbarrow down to my hydrangeas, I hop on behind Ed on his motorbike and we make our way to the local (evening) farmers market.  We mean to pick up only corn and to do our weekly exchange of eggs for cheese curds, but the beets look good as well and before you know it, we have a bagful of fresh produce.





Home then? No, not yet! We have our tennis rackets and so we stop in our secret forested courts and we play a dynamic if brief game of tennis.  Why brief? Because it's already late and there is supper to fix and freshly picked tomatoes to sort through (every two days Ed brings in about this many)...






So that wheelbarrow of mine surely filled quickly and I have no complaints because every hour today was (in my book) good, even if in the retelling it all seems rather straightforward. I assure you, it felt quite beautiful.

Oh, did you miss a posting of farmette flowers? Here, I haven't forgotten! At noon, in full sunlight:

eating habits

(at sunrise, out the upstairs windows)



Lunch

We bring our lunch to the porch today. Leftovers for Ed -- gnocchi from Monday's dinner. Isis sits at our feet, patient, but very much wanting a taste. And of course, Ed acquiesces. And sure enough, the cat that rejects most every cat food on the market, lovingly cradles in his mouth, then swallows appreciatively the potato dumplings, smothered in a light tomato and mushroom sauce, heavily sprinkled with freshly grated parmesan.

There isn't enough for Ed to eat after that and so he distributes the remains between the cheepers.

The farmette animals follow a strange diet.


Dinner

The evening meal on a Wednesday is a challenge. Ed often bikes on this day and doesn't get back until late. Sometimes hungry, sometimes not so much. So I make a farmette Niçoise salad. Using all farmette ingredients: tomatoes of course. Beans from our bean teepee.





Potatoes from the field out back, eggs from the cheepers. I skip the fish component. (There are no fish on the farmette.)

I settle in to watch the tail end of the PBS News Hour and eat my half of the salad.

Isis comes over.
Meow.
What, do tell me, is appetizing here for you? It's not as if there's any tuna or anchoives!





It's the potatoes. He's in that kind of a mood! I give him some, smothered in juices of the garden tomato and a dash of olive oil. His palate is definitely evolving. The cat's unstoppable!


Breakfast

You think I forgot about breakfast? Never!






And after, a walk through the garden. (It needs water again. Sigh...)










And still later -- a bike ride. Because even though I don't keep a step counter at my hip anymore, I know I'm not moving around enough by going from porch to yard to kitchen. Besides, it really is beautiful out there.



prairie, just up the road




truck farmers, working the fields to the east of the farmette




a friend along the road


There you have it: a day in three meals. And a little bit more.


One last photo, of that special slant of sunlight that tells us it's almost Autumn.

Tuesday

Sitting on the porch for breakfast, we feel the cool morning air. I have a sweater on and I know Ed's a little chilled, even though he would never say so.






What he does say is -- I'm going to miss those flowers in the winter time.

So this is it, that period in time that can't even be imagined in the cold season. Summer, a lush and plentiful summer where there was enough rain and enough sunshine to make our gardens grow.






And it seems so much part of our world now, even though in three months, it will all be gone. All of it. Pffft! Gone.






I spend the morning deadheading. Snipping off spent blooms to encourage one more run.  It's a beautiful time to work outside: the air is a cool 70 degrees, the wind refreshes and blows mosquitoes away to some distant hiding place. Can it be more perfect?






In the early afternoon, our truck framer who grows potatoes, onions and garlic in the back of the farmette, asks us to mow down her weeds for another planting run. Ed works his John Deere in exchange for a bucket of potatoes and a bagful of garlic.





And then he and I have a date! A movie and a dinner -- both frivolous and a bit of a joke, because the movie is a fun but silly little thing about restauranteurs squabbling in the south of France (a poke at the Ed who refuses to go back to my beloved Sorede exactly in that region) and the "dinner out" isn't really out at all, or at least it isn't one where we sit down across from each other at a table elsewhere; it's one where we pick up take out food at our favorite Thai place and bring it home.


Home. Where the flowers grow and the world is kind and calm and he cheepers look at me with hopeful eyes every time I pass them in the garden.