wet

It rained and thundered and rained some more -- all night long. Everything is soppy, muddy, thick with moisture, laden with water.

We do not need more rain.

Tell that to the weather gods. I hear they're to have another rumbling party tonight. And in the meantime, it's misty, cloudy, broody. And wet.

But misty cloudy broody does not bother chickens. The little girls, who are now happily sleeping "upstairs" in the coop, snuggled there with the big girls, are raring to be out exploring.

("What does she have here? Anything new? Will she be digging worms for us again??")






Ed and I are slower to get going. I suppose we miss that sunshine boost.






Still, the landscape is gorgeous now. Of this there can be no doubt.






(Yet another clump of tulips that escaped the jaws of the hungry local herbivores.)





We both do work outside though. Ed has a dead tree to remove (in the old raspberry patch, which this year has been cultivated and planted by him with buckwheat grain). I have stuff to move, weeds to dig out, and plants to put in. It wont all get done today, or even this week, but a steady work pace is far easier on the body than spurts of excessive activity followed by spells of doing nothing.

And we are rewarded by at least a short burst of sunshine! We'll take it!











I do pause at midday. I have a lunch date with my friend who is in town this week! How good it is to catch up with someone who knows so many details of your now not so young life!






And of course, in the afternoon, I come home with Snowdrop. She wants to be outside. She'd love the wading pool, but I have to be the responsible person here: it really is too cold. We settle for bubbles.






...which she loves!






... to pieces!






In short order, we all forget about the wet, misty, cloudy broody!






(You do get a little muddy on days like this. Add a bit of pain of chocolat to the mix and it's time to change attire. Grandma has spares!)






(Indoor pretend play is always exciting, delightful, crazy imaginative!)






Evening now. I don't hear rumbles in the skies. Instead, I see cracks in the cloud cover. It was, in the end, a lovely day. It will be even lovelier tomorrow to see the plants turn their faces toward warm sunshine.

Mother's Day

At some point in life, everyone has a mother. And a grandmother. Dads, grandfathers too, of course and oftentimes those dads and grandfathers or aunts or total strangers can have a profound influence on the life of the child, over and beyond what a mother might bring to the table. But even if you don't know or don't remember your mom, surely at some point you've wondered -- what was she like, this mother of mine?

You may not be at all like your mother, but I'm going to guess you have at least something of her. We all do. At least some of this (perhaps a wee bit, but maybe a lot) should make you proud.



I drive with Ed to the Flower Factory to buy a replacement plant (but really just to go there and be among flowers -- rare is the Mother's Day when I am not in a place of flowers) and en route we listen to an interview with a Turkish woman who had just written a cookbook. She'd been greatly influenced by her grandmother's cooking and as she describes the way her grandmother formed relationships with people through the food she cooked for them, I'm thinking -- what a beautiful memory she left behind.



It's a cool but dry Sunday, Mother's Day in this country.

It is for me a contemplative and beautiful day -- from beginning to end.



It actually begins for me with a climb up on the roof. I'll go far to snip branches of lilac for a Mother's Day table. Our white lilacs that hug a corner of the farmhouse are rather tall and all the blooms are, of course, toward the top. You can only get to them from the roof.

There! Fragrant and wonderful for breakfast.







Outside, the crab apples are coming into the peak of beauty. You just can't get enough of their loveliness.






At the Flower Factory, we admire a bit of landscaping: a constructed stream and pond.






It's especially interesting to us, because we think that they're building a retaining pond right next to the farmette in the new development. (There's a mighty big hole that's going in to the east of us.) We're wondering whether they'll go to the trouble of landscaping it prettily, or whether they'll ignore the aesthetics of it all. We can only wait, watch and hope.



Back at the farmette, I plant some 15 lilium bulbs and I put in decorative climbing peas. I retreat then inside, to cook dinner. And this is when I see them: four enormous hawks, perched on the barn roof, facing our chickens. The little girls take note and rush toward the shelter of trees, but of course, the hawks can easily give chase. I'm outside instantly, with a broom, waving it madly and making loud noises. I've heard that the presence of humans unnerves hawks and they prefer not to mess with their pray then.

The birds retreat into a row of trees at the edge of the property. I don't let them be. I chase with the broom, screeching all the way. They take flight, but only so far. They dive toward me again and again, as if at war. I persist.

Eventually, I win. They go away. I am so relieved!



Dinner is a table-ful of childhood favorites -- my girls' favorites. We've always started with predinner "small plates" and I continue this habit. Snowdrop is a great fan of roasted beets, olives, pepper strips and of course, a cracker with a sliver of cheese.  Tonight I add a bottle of wine (for those of us who can drink it) gifted by my younger daughter. It makes me feel she's here, too, in some small fashion!







Oh, here comes the young family, straight from soccer! I point out the young chicks -- they're examining my new plants on the picnic table!






(Snowdrop is the only soccer player I know who takes a big pink bow to the field with her.)






At the farmhouse now, opening Mother's Day presents!






(Snowdrop had already celebrated her own mom's special day. But hugs and snuggles are always in order.)






Dinner...






And just a few books. Daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother.






So much sweet sentimentality comes rushing forward on this day of mothers! I hope you had a wonderful day of recollections, memories and perhaps a few new joyful moments. Happy Mother's Day indeed!

Saturday

Gardening on a grand scale places extraordinary physical demands on you. And so sometimes, you take shortcuts. One favorite strategy is to invest in flowers that grow to a full size quickly, offering blooms the very year you put them in. And bulbs, the ones you dig in during the cool autumn months, hoping for a spring of heady blooms? You opt for the ones that naturalize. Meaning they divide and multiply. Imagine: you do nothing and your carpet of daffodils gets bigger and bigger!

Those are thoughts of a gardener who wants too much too soon. In growing flowers, you have to restrain yourself and resist promises of excess. Because it rarely turns out well: you put in spreading plants (coreopsis, I used to love you!) and suddenly they're invading neighbors and you can't get them to just stay put! And this year, I'm paying the price for putting in so many of those naturalizing daffodils. There should be a mass of yellow and white in my lily bed right now, but instead, there is a dense forest of daffodil leaves. The blooms have slowed down considerably. There are too many bulbs and they're crowding each other.

All this to say that today -- a still damp and gray and not too warm a day -- I pay my dues. My gardening work consists of the unpleasant task of removing dozens (perhaps hundreds) of daffodils from the lily bed. In theory, this should be done in fall, but I wont find them in fall. Right now, I see their dense mass and I can dig gingerly around the day lilies and pull them out and transplant them elsewhere (where perhaps they wont wreck havoc in the way that they do in my flower beds).

It's very unpleasant work and you feel foolish doing it, because you know that it's all your fault.

But, "unpleasant" is a relative term. My work is much for satisfying than, say, that of the family of truck farmers who came back today to dig out some of the rhubarb they'd planted in the fields next to us. Unfortunately, their farming days here are over as the development encroaches on the lands they worked for at least as long as I've lived here.






Oh, let's take a pause and think of something cheerful: my cluster of tulips -- wet from the rain, but standing tall! And no, tulips do not multiply. If anything, they fade each year and a good gardener would remove bulbs that are no longer producing much of anything. But this clump is vigorous and beautiful!






A pause for a very late breakfast. Way too cold for the porch.






Then back to work. On a more pleasant note -- I also put in seeds in the more distant flower beds. I always work with cosmos and nasturtium, but this year I added anemones and sunflowers and if the chickens would quit scratching the dirt around them, I might have a nice expanded flowering patch by the sheep shed.

Since the daffodils are looking sad after the heavy rains, I'll show off something else today. If you're a regular Ocean reader, you've seen these before, but still -- I love their presence and their demeanor especially in spring, when their small size fits so prettily into the emergent flower fields. (I'm referring to the bronze statues made by Ed's mother.)  Here's a trio of my favorites:


















And another gardening photo, this one with a focus on two flowers that theoretically should come back each year -- indeed, one of them is known to be quite the invasive! -- but neither really likes the winter conditions here all that much and most often I have to replace at least half of them from the previous season. (Here, I'm referring to my beloved gaura, aka bleeblossoms, and my equally beloved lavenders.)







In the evening, I scrub myself clean and engage in some social life. Sometimes I think late day frolicking belongs to earlier decades of my life: I rarely go out after dusk! But, there are exceptions and today offered one such opportunity. Still, as I drive to the get together, my mind wanders to my work outside: am I on schedule? Shouldn't I have put in the lilium bulbs that arrived yesterday? And what about...

May is always like that: you're either working outside or thinking about how you should be working outside.

I'll end with a pic of a really stunning set of daffodils that did not plunk down in the wind and rain. Can you blame me for planting too many of these faces of pure sunshine?

Friday

It's a cold and wet day. Really cold and really wet. But I can't possibly mind! I look outside and think -- what a difference a month makes! On April 11, the farmette was brown. The trees were as bare as they had been in December and January. The flower fields were flowerless. It may not be warm today, but still, when I look outside, I see this:






May is like an Impressionists' canvas. The rainy weather and pouty skies merely bring out the subtleties of the color outside. It's all rather magnificent!

Still, we do eat inside and we comment on how good it is to have a snug and warm farmhouse to retreat to on days like this one.





I haven't much to show for my morning. A fridge full of foods for the week, a tank with gas. And a good many minutes looking out at the rain and wondering if I could get Ed to cut the grass again so quickly after his first mowing job earlier this week. The showers have felled a good many of my daffodils, but they surely are responsible for the growth spurt in so many of the flowers and plants outside. And grasses.

In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. To her, rain means two things: no playground time during the school day (too bad), and the need to bring out the very pinkest umbrella on the walk to the car (yeah!).






Our rain is so constant, our temperatures so low, that even a small amount of outdoor time is not in the offering. It's been a long time since we've had to sit tight inside. And very early on, Snowdrop runs into trouble: something irritates her eye.

Hold on, let me see...
It's gunk! (She gets the terminology from the days she and virtually every child in her class had pink eye.)
No, Snowdrop, it's not that...
It's a sliver! A piece of wood! (Again, something that a classmate of hers struggled with, thankfully in her hand, not in her eye.)
It's not a sliver, Snowdrop. Just a piece of dirt. Maybe an eyelash.

There's nothing to do but to wash it out and then bring something out from the box of hidden treasures -- a few trivial things that I save for times like this. I reach for the Etsy dresses I had purchased from enterprising grandmas who sell hand sewn dolls' clothes. Snowdrop's doll family has lived in ratty jammies up to now. Today, they are regally attired!





The rest of the afternoon is devoted to her babes and us celebrating something or other. Oh, I remember: one of her babies had a birthday. How old is she? -- I ask. Sixty-eight! -- Snowdrop responds.






Much later in the evening, Ed, who has been at tech meetings most of the day asks me if I've seen the little chicks.
I have not.
Should we hunt around for them?

It's not hard finding the three girls -- they're huddled together in the barn. The winds are ruffling their feathers and they are clearly not a happy lot.





It's the coldest day they have ever known. We pick them up (for once, they're cooperative) and put them in the coop early. We've made their corner quite windproof. They happily settle in for a delicious late supper of chick feed and corn (we keep the big girls out for now to give them some space).

It's just this one last day of cold, I say to them, to Ed, to myself really. Just this one last day. I take a whiff of damp spring air -- it really does smell heavenly out there, in the wet, lush farmette gardens. Just heavenly.

Thursday

I have been splitting the month of May between home and the other side of the ocean for a long, long time. This year, of course, I'm staying put.

I'm here for my grandkids, sure, but also, I'm be here for the full period of bloom of the fruit trees and the lilacs. I'm here to leisurely sow flower seeds when the soil temperature is just right. We wont rush (or stall) the tomatoes: they'll go in when sound judgment tells us it's time. There is no deadline, there is no splitting myself between the two worlds, there is no hoping that the rains come here when I'm there. Because, well, I'm just here.

My gardening is very deliberate, but I get sidetracked. I bump into tiger lilies (aka ditch lilies) and vow to move them (Ed pleads with me not to just dig them out and "ditch" them). And more garlic mustard to pull out. And sprouting crab apples from the seeds pooped into the ground by the birds that routinely feast here.  Pull hard and toss.

You have to be a committed gardener to put in as much time into the effort as I do. When I was still working, I used to be miserable when the weather was perfect for outdoor work while I was stuck behind a desk. The feeling of wanting to be working the soil is visceral and it takes hold in spring and stays with you until the bugs and the dog days of summer chase you back inside.

But when you're digging, planting, surveying your past efforts and improving upon them, well then, it truly is a world of peace and calm that you inhabit.

This morning, we began with breakfast indoors. Ed sheepishly asked if we could stay away from the porch because of the truck noise (they're really going at it with grading all around us right now). At first I was incensed. Tune out the trucks! How often do we get good porch weather?! But in the end I agreed. After all, the front room windows look out over the front yard flower bed. I have put in so much work there and the only time we see it is when we are on the road, driving. (On the upside, you and every other stranger that drives by see it too!)







Just one photo from the early morning, before I plunge into work outside...






(And to the north and east and west of us, the trucks rumble by, carrying who knows what, for whatever reason.)






Lunch break. Fallen flowers tucked into the vase, plucked asparagus steamed briefly in a pot...






And in the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. I also pick up her mom and the three of us once again make our way to Kopke's Greenhouse. The young family wants to add another flower basket to their deck and I am looking to add something as well. The porch, at least on quieter days, is our oasis, our place of great magic. It deserves a summer season of blooms.






(Snowdrop loves my newly acquired pink gardening gloves. I go through at least three pairs of gardening gloves each year.)






The little one remembers to tend to the new flowers...






... She then shows me how well she can ride her trike right now!






And inside, she zips out her puzzles and puts them together without my assistance! When did that happen??






It seems with little ones, we're always asking -- when did that happen? They do not stand still.

I suppose you could say this about chicks as well: when did they grow to be as silly and sweet as they appear to be now?






In the evening, Ed and I walk the fields that are being ripped apart by construction machinery (you can see the trucks, diggers and rollers resting in a straight line formation at the edge of the field).





Though I've requested (and received) the detailed plans for this development project, nothing on paper looks like what's happening here now, so I must be blind to subtle planning nuances.

Tomorrow we will have a quiet, truck free day. Cold rain will be passing through our region and I'm sure work will once again stall.

In the meantime, it's a beautiful evening, here at the farmette! I hope it's beautiful where you are as well...

crazy Wednesday

There was nothing linear about this day. We jumped between extremes, between a placid quiet and a mad dash, between storms and sunshine, between celebration, graduation and worry (unwarranted in the end, but still...).

And it all started off so normal! I mean, there was rain. Well sure, my gardens like rain. Cool, yes, warranting a bit of heat in the house. It's May, I understand.

We eat breakfast inside, in the front room.






I welcome the break, really I do.  I haven't caught up with email, I'm coasting on only headlines from news sources and, too, there is the issue of the swimsuit. I want to find a good one for Snowdrop. Fact is, I've already purchased two. She wore them this week. Size 4 (she's 3 years old). And they're both too small. They'll be fine until, oh, Memorial Day.

So I lose myself in these mundane details of life and suddenly the clouds part and it's warm and, well, I should be gardening.

(We're about to enter the prettiest week of them all -- when the crabs and lilacs open up their pods of blossoms.)





I do go out. I'm in my final big push. Divide hostas now, or else! Finish with the annuals. Secure the vines. Plant the last of this weeks arrivals.

Phew, it suddenly feels very warm out there! Is it me, or is it that the storms have passed and there's a spray of sunshine?

Never mind, it's time to pick up Snowdrop. I have to get her to ballet on time: it's the last class and the little girls will have an audience of parents and grandparents.

But Snowdrop chooses this day to have the longest school nap ever. I arrive and wait for her to wake up. And wait. And wait. And finally, I give up, walk in and rouse her. Hurry, hurry, hurry! -- the words that will carry me through the next hour.

At the farmhouse, I speed through a book as she nibbles on her fruits. I do pose for a selfie, because one of the teachers pointed out that Snowdrop and I are exactly matched in our attire. Indeed! She has a pink-ish dress and purple sweater and I have purple pants and pink-ish sweater! Total coincidence!





Hurry, hurry, hurry!

She takes her time.
Grandma, we must walk slowly! I feel she is sharing some directive from school, perhaps from times of chaos in the classroom or on the playground.
But can't we rush just this once??
No, grandma! Slowly! I swear, she's at a crawl. Snails move forward at a better pace.

I get her to class just as it begins. Phew! Exhale.





It strikes me that this is the first of the many many performances she will go through in her growing years. Schools are full of them. Life is full of them.

This one is especially touching because she is so young -- the shrimp of the class (to remind you: she is in the upper percentiles in terms of height; she just happens to be young). And so to see her go through the steps of a 45 minute class is really quite lovely.





As always, they act out a story (it's called Storybook Ballet for a reason). This one is a very loose adaptation of Beauty and the Beast.

Here comes Belle!






... with her book! As you can see, I'm not the only one taking photos.






The little Belles are waking up the "beast" with tokens of love...






And then it all ends, pretty much at the same moment that my daughter receives a text of her husband's awesome work promotion.






(We go to the store where they pick up celebratory stuff.)





And now it's threatening to storm, only maybe not here, maybe just to the north, or is it east? Who can tell. Storms, clearings, downpours, drizzle -- we've had it all.

I return to the quiet of the farmette and finish up my gardening tasks for this day. And then I look for the little girls. I haven't seen them since the afternoon.
Ed, where are they?
I don't know...

I look everywhere. I call them. I whistle, whisper, shout. Nothing.

I return to the farmhouse.
I can't find them. I feel just terrible. Did we let them out before they have fully developed their street smarts? Were they nabbed by predators in broad daylight??

We are both out now, searching every space where they have been known to wander.

They must have thought us pretty silly as they sat perched on a ledge in the barn (invisible to us, at least initially), keeping an eye on the sudden frantic activity.





Oh, chickens! Oh, spring! How fun and funny you all can be!