recovery

Slowly the morning clouds let in a bit of blue...






...and eventually, by noon, we are in for sunshine!

We weren't expecting it. Indeed, our breakfast was still at the kitchen table...






But toward late morning, I nudged Ed to join me outside. We wont have many days like this one!





Fall yard work is different than spring stuff. It's occasional. It's sporadic. It's not very thorough. My goals are to set things on a path of recovery and maintenance. Dig out the major weeds, keep everything in reasonable order and then put it aside until spring. So today we cleared some of the major weeds that had in my absence invaded the raspberry beds. A friend stopped by and he watched as we pulled and dug and I explained to him about Oreo and sure enough, out came the rooster, attacking our visitor. Not that our friend was in anyway disturbed. He was raised on a farm and so a nice shove, or two, or three, sent Oreo flying. Still, I glanced at Ed with a "you see?"  expression. In case he needed further evidence.

Our ambitions being on the light side of things, we stopped early on, but still, it is rather remarkable how buoyant your mood is on a day where you work outdoors and your nails get dirty from the soil and the sun causes you to take off the jacket, then the sweater.

Wisconsin is, for the most part, a sunny state. And this is what makes all seasons here so breathtakingly beautiful.

And speaking of just that -- this breathtaking beauty, today I had to go into Madison again (for one of those appointments you have because you've reached that age!) and it struck me that I could come home the long way -- by way of the Arboretum.

What a stunning day it was to look at this gem of a place! To me, the Arboretum is an incredible (and incredibly underused, which is, I suppose, part of its charm) sanctuary especially if you live within the city boundaries. I used to go there far more often before I moved to the country. But on days like this, it's grand even for those of us who have natural beauty right up to our noses -- as I do at the farmette.  The Arboretum, as the name implies, has a variety of trees and they're all doing magnificent things right now!






Take a walk with me!






One path, better than the next...






One palate of colors more magnificent than the other...






In fact, I was so enchanted by it all...












...that I came home and dragged Ed out and we drove right back, for a forest walk.












Surely this was the day to say: I know it's a troubled world out there, but isn't it grand that there are places like this to make our senses swirl?






The second half of October does bring with is shorter days and the sun was quite low as we leave the Aroboretum...





...But not low enough to keep us from taking a detour to our hidden tennis court, where we play a sweet, sweet game of tennis, as spent White Pine needles swish around under our feet and the evening sets in.

more on writing

Whoever crossed my path in the last month has heard the same speculative comment from me about how it is that authors can ever write, given that, as David Gordon recently said (here), the mere mention of a character trait in a book invites speculation on the part of the reader that you, the author, were actually writing about (and criticizing) said reader.

And so I pick up with interest a comment by the recent recipient of the Man Booker Prize. Flanagan said yesterday -- “I only realized after [my father] died what an extraordinary gift that was. ["That" refers to the trust his dad had in him to write as he wanted to write.]  As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can’t be an act of filial duty.”

I suppose many writers set to their task because they have felt, in life, deprived of a forum. Finally, an audience, no matter how small, to listen to and surely acknowledge the grievance they've felt! And that's a fine reason to write, I suppose. But there are others and I surely belong to the category of others.

Perhaps closing myself off (as I have, see previous post) is a way for me to lessen the risk of loss. Unlike Gordon, I shan't care if someone defriends me on FaceBook because of something I've written. And I know already that writing for a public forum, no matter how bland your story, causes some to back away. I know this from writing Ocean. I started this blog with the premises that I don't want to offend and I learned quickly that my marker of what is offensive may not be the same as that of another person. Ed used to ask -- when you retire, will you finally write honestly? The dean wont be able to scold you anymore! (To clarify: the dean never scolded me, but others have!)

My answer, of course, is that I do write honestly. Remarkably so. But I side step trouble because, in fact, that's how I live. Run away from trouble? That's me!

Book writing, however, is different. I am invested in Ocean, but I am perhaps even more invested in my book project. There, I tread less carefully. The story cannot flow without that sense of freedom that Flanagan talks of. At least not that story!



In other news -- if the skies parted some this morning, I didn't see it. It is wet and drizzly and breakfast is again in the kitchen.






Ed pokes at me mercilessly for casting the final vote on Oreo's future. His tease is his way of transitioning to a time without Oreo, but still, I surely will be relieved when whatever is to happen to the old rooster in his next life happens soon, so that we are both not so tortured by the specter of it. (The chicken mama never quite comes when she says she will so we are still waiting.)



(still blooming)


 Late in the afternoon, we go to Farm & Fleet to buy more chicken feed. We are surely invested in the chicken project, even as there will be a shift in our brood soon.






Still later, toward evening, we go bowling. This is a sign of late Fall. Too cold for tennis. Or for biking. Too warm for snow and skiing. I am a terrible bowler (no one to my knowledge bowls in Poland), but I love active games that Ed and I do together and over time, I will get better!

Who says I'm not a cup half full person?!



(still blooming)

writers, chicken keepers and good things inbetween

Writing

When Poland rather abruptly changed its course from so called Communism to market capitalism (1989), there was the obvious fallout. A stagnant economy, abandoning its centralized price fixing and opening the doors to free market forces meant, for one thing, that Poland's unemployment rose from near 0% to 20% almost instantly. (To be sure, growth then happened quickly -- more quickly than in any other country of the former Eastern Bloc, but for some Poles, economic success would never be attainable.)

If there was a professional group that was especially excited and yet suddenly vulnerable, you could say that it was the writers -- those feeding the starved palates of the literati. In post war Poland, the writers wrote under a cloud of censorship, but their pay was guaranteed and rather on the high end of the compressed pay scales. Good literature flourished. So did propaganda pieces, but there was also a flurry of well crafted allegorical pieces that to this day instill pride. What was missing was the proliferation of, well, eye catching, consumer driven junk. With market capitalism, the doors swung wide open and writers watched in horror as many made money on publishing the lowest of the low grade books and magazines, while many of the good, established authors were left scrambling.

I thought about this early in the morning as Ed and I tossed to each other  "articles you might want to read" as we scanned the morning press on line. He pointed me to an opinion piece that talks of the Amazon factor in the publishing world. Amazon now controls most of our reading material and it is pushing us away from publishing as we know it, into something that is very new, very egalitarian and very price driven. Ed comments -- in a few years, all those agents and publishers you're writing to may be obsolete.

Well now, is this a good thing? I'm worrying -- what if Amazon does to books what the grocery chains did to food fifty years ago? (Lots of it, cheap, but with all that we now know about processed, pumped up food.)

Of course, it's different with books. As Ed would comment -- who is to say what's great reading?
I answer him -- I can tell a book that's badly written in a breath. Do we want our kindles and libraries to be stocked with poor writing?
Ed wont buy that argument. Not everyone wants to read Dostoyevsky, he reminds me. (Reminding me, too, that even I don't often peruse the so called greats. In fact, my current stack includes a British cozy -- which honestly, may have been written in three months or less.)

I've argued before that the French, with the passage of the Lang Law, do a great service to authors and publishers alike by regulating book pricing (you cannot discount books by more than 5% below the publisher's price). Other countries -- Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, to name a few -- have similar laws protecting the publishing industry.

Not so the U.S. and if it means that Amazon will decide what books we read, so be it.

But is that so bad? Right now, the rarefied world of acclaimed writers is, well, rarefied. Entry into their club is prohibitively difficult. Isn't it good that we shake up that world a bit? As Ed would say -- that we pull the red carpet from under the feet of the anointed?
And what of the writer? I ask him. I mean, the professional writer who no longer will have an advance, a panting agent at her side, a publisher to organize book reading tours?
Again, my buddy tells me: a machinist will work his day job and play with his tools at projects over the weekend. There will always be writers because people have things to say and others want things to read.
And it's true -- like his machining buddies, I did my writing project (at least 90% of it) before I retired. Weekends and vacations.

I think about all this as I wake up to another day of tormented skies and bouts of rain.

Lunch

Retirement has been breathtakingly wonderful. It has been sublime on practically all fronts. But there are the exceptions and one obvious one is that I have become more of a recluse. Moving to the farmette had already pushed me in that direction. Leaving my workplace for good solidified it.

Oh, I see family and ironically, I see my friends who do not live here. I visit, they visit -- all that happens with greater frequency now that my schedule is less constrained. And I see my work buds once every six weeks. But do I make dates with people who live close by? No I do not.

And so it is unusual for someone to shake me out of my complacent isolation. I resist. But this friend knew where to hit with her attack: with an invitation to lunch and we settled on the quite special Nostrano -- a restaurant on the square...






...that has, to put it bluntly -- great food.






It's the kind of place where you can order for lunch Beet Sformato, with pickled cherries, grilled radicchio, cocoa nibs and walnut vinaigrette.






And for a main course --orecchiette with  spicy fennel sausage, Milano turnips, rapini, preserved meyer lemon, and Fiore Sardo (which is a cheese; I did not know that!).






For dessert? I cannot recall the name, the ingredients, but it included chocolate and blackberries and hazelnut and, too, coconut ice cream.










In other words -- it is food to live for! (A much better expression than "to die for," don't you think?)

Does this mean that I have now reemerged? That I will rejoin the social world and make it a point to set up dates and meetings in the months ahead? Probably not. But for this one wonderful lunch, I talked for hours and ate regally.


Oreo

At breakfast, we talk about the shifts and vicissitudes in our various orbits.







In addition to Ed's machining preoccupations and my writing immersions, there is the matter of Oreo, the rooster. As Scotch came around asking for a few seeds, as Butter looked up and down for the person who would bring a morning treat, I sighed, knowing that I didn't want to go out and confront the rooster problem.



(Oreo lurks in the background)


It was time to call the cheepers' owners. (Remember, we are but foster chicken keepers.) Immediately the chicken mama understood. Oreo doesn't belong with the pack anymore. He's shielding them alright, from the human contact they'd come to appreciate.

She was supposed to come tonight to take him to "her father's place." We don't quite know what that means and we don't ask. I imagine (in my hopeful mode) that it is chicken central -- some mega operation where there are many roosters and hens comingling and getting through the day. The chicken mama is like Ed -- concern for animals is in her soul. She would not let Oreo be in a place where he will be poorly treated, though of course, he will never have what he has here - his own three girls, three acres to play in, two people who are pretty intent on making his world a happy place, as if to compensate for all the chickens we've encountered and yes, consumed, that had a less than good life.

She doesn't come. And so we have a prolonged departure, even as departure it will be. For now, Ed squeezes in his cuddles and I look on. 





In the evening, the wind dies down. Tomorrow there'll be a crack in the cloud cover. No, wait, there is already a crack in the cloud cover.

And that's a good thing.

not on speaking terms

Have you ever had this happen to you? A friend stops being your friend and you cannot figure out why?  It's a rare event, but it happens. (It's different than a friend who stops speaking to you for known reasons. That's painful, but at least you understand the thought process behind it.)



(just before the rain)


I can't help but think that the rooster and I are in this kind of quagmire: I do not get his sudden (and not very consistent) distrust and anger toward me, at the same time that I am sure he'll never understand why we are about to give up on him. After four good days, he had a retreat today and honestly, it was the most puzzling one of all, because I was feeding the girls...






...and I noted him hobbling slowly toward us, so I fed him his own special handful...
 




...and just as I was going to leave them all to their treat, he chased after me and lunged.

Even Ed is beginning to lose hope with our training plan. It seems to have had no lasting effect.

To add to the drippiness of the day -- the weather finally broke. And I mean really broke. Like a tear in the sky that let out a pent up stampede of rain. Oh, did it rain! (And it will continue to do so for the next few days.)

On the upside, there was breakfast. In the kitchen.






And then I worked on my holiday cards. (I'm not that compulsive -- it's because a good sale at my favorite card printer ends today.) If you consider yourself to be a friend and have never received a season's greeting from me, it's because I don't have your address! Email it over! My father once told me that if there was one custom in the world he would get rid of, it would be that of sending cards. I didn't agree with him then (fifty years ago) and I don't agree now, in this day of e-cards and cyber-everything.  (Even though my Polish friends commented last year that getting that card from me in the mail was so... retro.)

And after the card making effort, I went to the library. For a stack of books you would love to be reading on a wet, gray day.

At the moment, I'm forgetting roosters and raindrops and I am losing myself in the most delicious reading.

Such a dreamy, misty, wonderful day!

clean

Not wanting to spend too many waking hours on house chores, I've become more relaxed about farmhouse cleaning. Nevertheless, in addition to random spot tidying and bathroom polishing, every two weeks, I do a thorough top to bottom job. (With Ed as my vacuum cleaner.) Always on Sunday. It puts a good foot forward to the week ahead. It makes me feel orderly and in control.

And so it is that on a beautiful October morning, I do my duty to this old house and now I have the reward of enjoying its glitter and shine.

But that's not the end of it.

After breakfast -- where we did revel in the sunshine, albeit indoors...






...we head out and target the vegetable patch. Overgrown with weeds and spent tomatoes, peppers, peas, corn, brussel sprouts, cukes, and, to my shock -- eggplant (honestly? I planted eggplant? I completely forgot about it!) -- we have our fists full of stuff to dig out.

Dig, pull, shake off dirt, toss.





As I work up and down the strip of land, I'm thinking that winter is nature's gift to gardeners like us. I know how excited we get in February in picking seeds for the year. How easy it all seems then -- keeping tabs on the little seedlings, watering, watching, waiting. The plants grow, we put them into the ground, they bear fruits and veggies, some of them get to our table, many of them are eaten by the animals that pass this way (this year, we lost nearly all of our peas, brussel sprouts, strawberries, and grapes). We water, we harvest, and by the end of it all, we need a break!

It is wonderful to tidy things up in the garden, but it is even more wonderful to retreat home after and to put the plot out of our minds until... February.

And by the farmhouse, so long as the frost never quite takes hold, we sueely have the dash of color. Cosmos and beyond!






This evening, my girl and her husband are with us again for Sunday dinner.





...a good opportunity to make gnocchi, remembering the ones I ate in Italy, wishing I had their mushrooms here! Never mind, we have an abundance of market spinach. Yay spinach.

...and, too, I had picked the stragglers in the rhubarb patch -- enough for a rhubarb cake.

I think about how *homey* this day has been. My grandmother would be proud!

As for my writing (this in answer to a commenter) -- I did send out the requested text last week and now have several weeks of idle time, though I have the next half dozen agents to work with should this one, in the end, fizzle. It is daunting. One agent posts on her web page that she gets 250 queries per week. The one I'm currently working with posts that she responds to only 1% queries. The world is loaded with writers!

And you know what? I think that's a good thing!

Saturday

A Fall has never felt so intense, so brilliant and heady -- there's no meekness to it, it's glorious, it's strong, it hits you straight up!

I blame the weather.

We wake to yet another crisp and clear morning. Too crisp. I bring up my weather page and note in shock that our village is registering a reading of 30F. That's below freezing, to all you non Americans!

Ed!

I had left all the pots outside. Forecasters had predicted a low of 35. I was not ready for this. At the very least, my potted flowering tree should be inside.

Ed!  I get spoiled by his willingness to lug things around for me, even at the earliest hours.

In the end, I can tell by all my sprawling nasturtiums that it must have been nano-hundredths of a degree above freezing. Those plants just lose it at 32. They turn to mush instantly and there's no going back. And this morning, they were still perky, in a struggling sort of way.


We have breakfast in the glory of the sun room...






...and then I head out to meet my daughter, you know, that one!






...for our walk to the downtown Farmers Market, where I actually have a rather large list of purchases to make: the last beautiful corn, exquisite heads of broccoli, many pounds of spinach, arugula, the last of the local raspberries, oyster mushrooms (oh, I missed those in the last month!), cheese curds (for Ed), goat cheese (for Ed), macaroons (for Ed).

It's a beautiful day to be at the market. It could not be more splendid. Even as I offer no photos. Well, one. Of someone else going for the shot. We have a lot of photo enthusiasts here.






At the farmette, Ed and I return to the rose removal project. I cannot tell you what a relief it is to dig up and clean out the invasives on this property. Last year, it was the raspberries. This year, obviously the rose spikes got us going. Once again, the cheepers join us... 






...and Oreo gets his plum rewards for not lunging anymore. Ed says -- you are, to him, every other person. If he doesn't lunge at you, he wont lunge at others. You have to admit that the man is guided by eternal faith in the animal spirit.


The light is so generous now. It gives us the gold even as we would settle for less. 






And finally, the evening comes. Quickly. And still, we make room for tennis. Yes, sure, it's all  coming to a seasonal end. But we don't finish with a whimper. On the courts, we put our souls into the game.



(path to our secret, hidden tennis court)


Alright. Time to go home. To the farmette.

These have to be the last images of our blooming annuals. The growing season will end any day now, but we can't complain: it's been a stunning run.

Friday

It's still very dark at 5 a.m., but I'm awake. I hear the scratching sound. It's a critter. Mouse, probably. But where? I pick up the bedside flashlight and shine it around the room. Ed sleeps. Isie, perched at my feet on the bed, watches. Nothing. Quiet. I turn out the light. Scratch, scurry, scratch. Light on -- nothing.

I turn to Isie: are your mouser days really over, pal? Isie is getting old. He looks at me, looks out at the corner of the room, then waits.

There's nothing to be done. The critter is probably inside the wall somewhere and the entry points are too numerous to contemplate. Ed plasters spots and fixes old boards all the time, but in a house this age, you cannot ever hope to seal it.

It's time to bring out the traps. A ritual for us. Every Fall, out they come, staying with us until the last sign of frost in May.

Last year, by springtime, the generation of mice learned how to enter and exit the traps without closing them. I think it's physically impossible to do this, but somehow, come morning, the peanut butter would be gone and the trap would have no mouse in it. Still, we caught and released a good dozen in the course of the winter. This year, since Ed isn't traveling, we're hoping for an even higher success rate. And a dumber mouse family.

Ed goes to the basement and brings up a favorite little plastic contraption. What's this -- he looks at it curiously. It's got stuff inside!
What, a decomposed mouse?
No no, stuff!
It seems that a mouse has been building a nest. Inside the trap. Now that's a new one!

In the meantime, the skies are once more beautiful and blue, even as we start off the day with a brisk 33.3 degrees. One degree less and I would have lost my annuals. Now they're safe for another week outside. After, I'll have to decide which I want to try to winter over.

Friday is a tech meeting day for Ed and typically I grocery shop, but I am a little off schedule, having shopped after my return, so I decide to go into town and have my laptop checked. It was making very loud noises all last night during the government board meeting on the future of the development to the east and north of us (I got quoted in the local paper, so I must have chosen my soundbites well!).

And so, after breakfast...






(and a quick look out at pockets of the yard...)






...on the way to the Apple Store, I make two stops - both wistful, but in very different ways.

First, I go to the Underground Butcher. I have an errand there, of a non-meat variety. They sell other stuff there as well. For example:






But honestly, when I'm there, I just a tiny bit regret that we don't eat red meat. These people do meat so well that you want to reconsider your position on being a reluctant meat eater. At least I do. Ah well. Must not succumb to temptation.

The second stop is one where I can indulge, because the feast is entirely visual. It's one of my favorite spots for Autumnal walks in the city -- Owen Woods.







And I notice that Fall is actually late this year. The typically vibrant gold of the forest has a ways to go yet.






Still, it's a beautiful place, even now.






A good half hour spin is almost medicinal in what it does to your heart and soul.






And now comes the dreadful mall, offset in its awfulness by the greatness of the Apple store, where the tech crew is always so fantastic and so helpful that it makes my heart sing, albeit in different ways than in the forest.


Finally, I'm home. The light is so different at the farmette now. The front north facing flower bed is nearly always in shade. The path to the shed, too, receives little sunlight. (It's better on the other side of December: the days are still short, the angle of the sun is the same, but without leaves on our numerous trees, the days are actually much brighter.) The cheepers hardly forage and the hens lay eggs sporadically (Scotch -- not at all). You really feel the pulse of the day slowing down.

And that may not be such a bad thing.

I dig a little, by myself. (Ed is still at his meetings.) No, not entirely by myself. The cheepers rouse themselves and join me and I feed Oreo worms from the shovel, to remind him that we're friends. The light fades, the cheepers rest under a cart loaded with pulled rose bushes. I coax them out for a pre-bedtime seed snack.






And for Ed and me, what dinner? Time to make chili. It surely is the season for it.

the way things are

How sweet the memory of those spring days, when Ed and I worked so hard to bring the farmette to her full potential! When the cheepers would follow us everywhere we worked, because with all that digging, we were bringing up a bounty of worms for them! I'd come up with a shovelful and distribute the poor worms to Scotch and Butter, Whitney and Oreo.

Such good days they were!

This morning dawned clear and blue again and we were a tad late in getting out to let the cheepers out. I, of course, said -- you go. He said -- come with me. So, reluctantly, I wrapped myself in the sleeping bag and we trudged out. It really is pretty in these earliest hours of the morning.


















( a tiny daylily! in October!)



Oreo wont care, he'll leave you alone -- famous last words. True, Oreo ignored me coming out, but as we passed the gang on our way back to the farmhouse, he lunged and had a very ineffective battle with my sleeping bag.

Sigh...

And yet, at breakfast...






...I felt less disturbed by this. You could say -- ah, she's getting used to violence. No! But I sort of get what's going on. And yes, I know that this is an uphill struggle -- to get him to calm down again, in the way that he had calmed down for all of the summer, toward me, toward everyone. It's become obvious that Oreo can't really hurt me. And sure, perhaps in the future, I wont be able to trust him with others (little others, for example) and so if he doesn't calm down, he'll have to go. But even though he is not a little irritating right now, I'm thinking -- if I can give him a few moments (months? years?) of life, then that's a good thing, no?



(the brown tones of late Fall)


I worked on my various writing projects inside most of the day, despite the sunshine, the brilliant weather -- I had inside stuff to do.

But toward the end of the day, Ed and I went out to tackle the multiflora roses that grow to the side of the courtyard. I'd always disliked them -- they grow like a prairie fire and they spread, invade and destroy everything in their path, including the person who tries to remove them. But, with Ed, the best strategy is containment rather than removal and so I'd worked to trim rather than dig. But in my absence, Ed did volunteer work on prairie restoration on some trail or other and he learned there the viciousness of this particular plant and so now he is on board: these guys have to go.

It was a tough set of minutes. Even our anti-brambler protective clothing can't fully shield us from the vicious thorns. And the roots! Oh, the roots!

We dig, clip, heave and of course, in the process, move much soil. And the cheepers see the commotion and they come to where we are working and honestly, it is like old times. All four of them settle into scratching the loosened soil for worms and other goodies. And Oreo, satisfied with just a few plump worms, sits back and watches us all work and I think -- yes, he deserves his happy time of watching over the hens. They're all in it together. This is what they are. (Even as I know that tomorrow, I'll still feel the frustration of needing the protective sleeping bag and it will take more than a day or two to get him to fully relax... if indeed, he can ever relax again.)






In the evening, Ed and I are at the public hearing again, where I speak in favor of marshlands over development. It strikes me, as I bring up the plight of the disappearing gentian flower, the muddy waters of the springs feeding into our lake, how much easier it is to just ignore these small losses. A flower. A super annoying rooster. And yet... Yeah, there's the 'and yet.'