Friday

Time played tricks on me today: it moved forward faster than I expected. I wasn't prepared for its quicker pace and so now, here I am, at the end of the day wondering why there are so few minutes left.

As is often the case on a busy day, I'll allow myself to step back and let the camera do the story telling.


It's a breathtakingly beautiful day. Cool, sunny, lovely.

July habits are strong and enduring. I begin the day with work in the flower beds.

(looking out toward the writer's shed)





465 spent lily blooms clipped and tossed. What remains is all that outrageous beauty that a tended garden offers.





The cheepers are close at my feet until I acquiesce and retreat to the barn to feed them.

(Cupcake wants to know why Stop Sign gets fed right away, while she and the other girls have to wait. Life is unfair, young girl. It's just plain unfair.)











I love all my flowers, of course, but the flower bed by the porch is the one I've worked on the longest: it has the greatest complexity and it's the one that I study all the time, from every angle, every side.






Breakfast.






Breakfast view.






And in the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop.






We come to the farmette, but again she wants to play outside. Yep, frisbees.






She wants more players. Ahah, will you come and play frisbee with us?






She sees his bare feet and tosses her own shoes aside. The cheepers are convinced they will soon get a treat. They hover. We try to ignore them.






She jumps...






Somewhere in that hour of outdoor play, Snowdrop gets a bug bite in her lower lip. I'm guessing a horsefly, though I did not see it nor hear it. Her lip swells to some great proportions. She insists on a bandaid. Well why not.

We prepare snacks for my guests who are about to arrive. Snowdrop devours half of them: cured meats,  cheeses, olives -- she eats them by the handful.






My daughter arrives with her two good friends who are visiting right now. Sparrow and his dad are here, too, but I put down my camera after this shot.





Sometimes, you just have to let go of picture taking and listen. Young people almost always have clever and funny things to say about... really pretty much anything.


Evening. The light now is best in the back of the Big Bed. So full, so delicate and infinitely lovely.

catch your dreams

When I step out just a wee bit after sunrise, I often hesitate about taking my camera along. I tell myself -- I've given Ocean readers as many lily pictures as they could possibly stomach. So what that each day brings out a completely new set of blooms that have never been photographed before! It's still a lily field. Full of lilies. And bee's balm and phlox and false sunflower and whatever else comes into the mix.

But I swear, I take one look and I am so in love with what I see, that I go back to draping the old reliable camera around my neck again. And again. The moments when the light on a flower is exactly right...






... when the flowers are positioned just so, with their beaming faces all shining toward you so beautifully...

(These are my midsummer queens: their appearance is like a whiff of pure magic; when they finish their bloom, I feel like summer is packin' up its bags)







... those moments are fleeting. Indeed, a daylily bed is fleeting. So is summer. So is life. A photo allows me to take note, to linger, even as my schedule tells me I must move on.






In the thick of a snowless, monochromatic February day, I'll look at these same flower fields and think -- were they really with that much color? It seems impossible!






One glance at a July photo and I realize that it's all there, waiting to bloom again come summer.






Today, I actually was greeted initially not by my lilies or by the cheepers, but by Stop Sign.






She has been eating copious amounts of food. Either her other food sources have dried up, or she's pregnant, reminding us of our feral cat obligation to catch her and have her neutered. If it's a female. And if, in fact, she isn't someone else's cat!

So I feed her. And then I pluck my lilies (402 today) and groan at the damage to the real lilies whose heads and leaves have been eaten by deer, or groundhogs or whoever else is hell bent on devouring my flowers.





Breakfast, on the porch, despite the roar of trucks nearby. Ah, but some day there will be parkland...





This is the morning for me to shop with my mom. We're looking for certain foods she'd grown accustomed to in Berkeley. We find some plausible substitutes at the Coop.





And I take her as well to the bakery where a few times each week, I pick up pain au chocolat for Snowdrop.






Did I tell you how lovely the day is? Partly cloudy, breezy and very mild. September weather, really. Seasons come and go. But the photos stay with us for as long as we want them.


In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. We do go to the playground (I find a clip in my purse for her hair -- the wind is really kicking things around by the lake)...


 


... and she swings good and hard. But a curious thing happens. She wants to be pushed -- her own pumping never gives her the height she loves. But she also wants to talk and I keep telling her that it's impossible for me to hear her because her words fly off with the wind toward the lake, away from where I'm standing.

And so she asks to go back to the farm.

As we walk back to the car, she tells me that someday she will live in a farmhouse. She'll be like Ed and fix everything. She spins a futuristic vision that is elaborate in detail and fantasy. As we reach the car, she sighs. I want to be older...  -- she tells me.
Well, you are growing up and being three and a half seems kind of fun too...
Growing is only fun because then I can be the age I want to be.
And what age is that?
Ten and a half.

I had to write down her words to get them right. I want to remember that at three and a half, you long for nothing more than to be able to do more than you can do right now. I suppose that when you get much older, you remember fondly all that you could once do, but can't anymore.


We never quite get to playing inside the farmhouse. The day is so grand that Snowdrop wants to stay out in the yard. She picks up the disks and does a mean toss. And another.





And another...








And another.






Evening. Catch your dreams before they slip away (if you're my age, you'll remember the song that gave us those words)...





Beauty pops up year round in a garden, but in July, it throws itself at you. For one magical moment, it is everywhere, all the time.You hold onto it as best you can.

parks and recreation

Ed and I are getting to know our town's administrators very well. The development all around us is huge and we have many questions. We have met with the city engineer. We have spoken to our representative. And today, we had a visit from the head of the Parks Department.

Fitchburg (the name of the town where we live) is a sprawling place. I was not surprised to hear that within its borders there are 45 parks. Nine more are being added -- some of those will abut farmette land.

It's the same old predictable story. The city Parks Department is understaffed, overworked and trying to do its best managing a diverse bunch of outdoor spaces. It's clear that any new park will have to not drain resources. (My dream of a beautifully planted space, with wide avenues, benches and chairs, fountains with boats for children and ice cream stands and weekend puppet shows is possibly a little farfetched. More in line with reality is a basketball pavement, a water fountain, and a shelter for barbecues.) Still, one can be imaginative and not spend millions, right?

We want to stay involved because the dedicated parkland is huge, at the same time that it can be buggy, sloping toward protected wetlands where fowl, cranes, frogs and bugs have a happy evening party every day of the summer season. The future use has to be clever, relying on the hard work of people who care enough to work without compensation.

Of course, before our early morning meeting with Mr. Parks Department, I have to tend to my garden. (461 lilies snipped.) I know that the future parks here will not resemble Lazienki in Warsaw or the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, but still, I want to put my best garden face forward.


























Mr. Parks Department is impressed. I beam.

We have a splendid first chat. We listen to his presentation, ask very many questions and generate not a small number of ideas. In the next year, a vision will begin to take shape.







Somewhere in the morning hours, there was a breakfast. Take my word for it.






(View from our breakfast table...)







And in the late morning hours, there is a visit with baby Sparrow. Here he is, a month and a half old, still calm, still tall as they come.






(Oh, gaga! You're so gradnmotherly!)






And in the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop.

(She is at the art table, making a book.)






We have a planned recreation for today: my daughter's good friend is flying in for a longer visit. We are all to meet up at the community pool for an afternoon swim. (Well, Sparrow is a little young for this; he stays home with his dad.)











We finish the afternoon with a snack at the coffee shop (and more book sketches).






Evening. Ed bikes, I cook. Eventually we'll both fall asleep on the couch. I know I'll dream of parks. Ed? Of gutsy recreation.

where's the cold?

Just before midnight, Ed cuts himself a slice of watermelon. It's his favorite snack on a summer's night.
Why isn't the watermelon cold? -- he asks.
It's past my sleepy time, but I force myself to give it some thought: is it a philosophical question? Is there a right or wrong answer?
No, seriously, why isn't it cold? 
Ed likes cold fruits. He likes cold beverages: there are always two glasses, each a quarter filled with water, in the freezer. It's his way of making any beverage chilly as can be. Me, I'm indifferent to it. Is food cold? How do I know? Milk gets steamed for coffee, veggies are cooked, cheeses are brought to room temperature.  I hadn't really noticed if the watermelon is or is not cold.

We walk over to the kitchen, open the fridge and do a touch test. Everything seems just a little lukewarm.

It's not cooling, is it?
Nope.

It's almost funny to end this day with a broken fridge. Just on this one day, Ed has already fixed his car. He has unplugged a slow drain in the bathroom and now he is about to take apart the refrigerator.

Midnight comes and goes. Ed pokes around the internet for youtubes on what to do when this particular model fails.

There are many upsides to the story: the garlic/peppermint oils applied this evening have chased the mosquitoes away. So it's not horrible to plug in Ed's little refrigerator in the sheep shed and walk our foods over to it. Moreover, this could have happened when he was away. I tell him I would have bought a new refrigerator and charged him for it, just to get back at him for going away.
You would... -- he responds.
No, actually I'd probably sit down on the floor and cry.

In the end, after clearing out the fridge and cleaning all the shelves and drawers that somehow look really gross only when you remove them and look at them in bright light, I leave him to his tinkering. There's nothing more I can do.

Not too many hours later, it is daylight and we're up again, anxious to get my car to the big box auto tire center so that we can be first in line and have the new tires mounted before I have to pick up Snowdrop. By this time, Ed's figured out that the refrigerator's defrost thermostat is broken. A new part can come from Amazon tomorrow. Or, he can go across town and pick up said part today.

It's your choice, I tell him.

He knows how much I dislike the disarray in the kitchen. I'll feel adrift until order is restored.

He gets on his motor bike and goes across town to get the missing part.

I return to snipping daylilies. 462.


























And then we eat breakfast.






And shortly after, I pick up Snowdrop.

Grandma, can we go to the store and buy pineapple? I saw it in a Daniel Tiger video.  I have not eaten pineapple. Can we get some please? 
Well why not...
I'm so excited!

It's unfortunate that the one in Whole Foods comes peeled to its core. It doesn't look at all like the fruit that grows in pineapple fields. Still, the girl is thrilled. And I am too. It's been a while since she and I have been out shopping together.

I bring her (and all that pineapple) to the farmhouse. She eats, she plays...






But not for long. It's dance class day: they're practicing for an end of summer (really??) mini recital that's to take place next week.
















When her dad picks her up, she is full of stories and instructions for that final class.
We will come into the room smiling. You will take lots of pictures and then....
Her voice trails off. I leave behind a happy, chatty girl.






Evening. Beautiful, beautiful light onto a sublime landscape.





I'm already looking forward to working on next year's crop of flowers. Nature's beauty is addictive.

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hums quietly, as if nothing had ever been amiss. The watermelon is once again very cold.