Sunday

So what did you do today?? -- my daughters will ask me. Their lives are so busy, so full. I think my typical Sunday must look completely tame by comparison. (That's a nice way of saying boring.)

Well, so be it. Sundays are meant to be quiet days. My day today was quiet.

(Morning farmette walk...)






(So obviously autumn...)






(The surprise day lily...)






(Breakfast!)






In the afternoon we do what was once so typical for us, but what had to give because of the demands of this summer: Ed and I play frisbee golf, among prairie flowers and grasses of early fall.







Ed is still walking about barefoot. I admire that. He tells me it would take only a week to toughen my feet. I look at the thistle in the prairie fields -- nah. I'll keep my shoes on.






(So beautiful!)






(Selfie!)






In the evening, the young family is here for dinner. I tell Snowdrop we have to pick nasturtium for the salad. She is happy to help!






Sparrow, who is just 3.5 months, is too young to offer credible assistance.






It's warm enough to eat dinner on the porch. Oh, we will miss this lovely place to gather in the months to come!






(Snowdrop demonstrates a pout. She wants to show us how a little girl might feel when told she has to wait for dessert.)






And what am I offering for an after dinner sweet? Treats from my Polish friends: cookies with cherries, exquisite chocolates...






The pout doesn't last long.






Sparrow takes it in, from the lap of the big guy.






So, a quiet day, don't you think? Wonderfully uneventful. Yeah.

seasons

I do not think it was intentional, but it happened that my daughters were married on the cusps of new seasons -- my younger girl on the first day of summer and my older one -- well, on this day, so on the first day of fall. I have always loved this symmetry and, too, the nod toward the parade of seasons, toward the change that comes with them and they joy each one brings you. At least that's how it all appears to me.






When I was in Paris, I thought I'd pick up a card for this particular day. I was tempted to just get the standard birthday one with the greeting "joyeux anniversaire" or "bon anniversaire" but I thought to ask if it's appropriate for a wedding anniversary. The sales clerks shook their heads. Well then what? You could go with "felicitation," they said. A card with the generic "congratulations." Fine then, but it sounds so... removed from a wedding. Well, I do as the French do: I write my own message inside.






It's a gorgeous day! Cool, true, there is that, but brilliantly sunny and very fallish. A happy day indeed, especially since everyone for once got a good night of sleep. We are a well rested bunch!






Breakfast? Oh, definitely in the kitchen, with the door to the porch closed against the morning chill. It's barely 50F (10C) out there. Brrr!






Later in the morning, I meet my daughter and Snowdrop for the Saturday farmers market.


(Coming out of the car with a story...)






(She always begins our Saturday market walk with a croissant, for a second breakfast...)






(She is enchanted with the Badger Band, especially when they play a polka!)






(it's a beautiful day to be out with a little one...)






Well, I suppose it's a beautiful day to be out, period. At the market I buy 50 more pounds of tomatoes for our winter loot, and, too, several ears of corn from a farmer who really knows how to push the season! There is so much more that I could load into a shopping bag, but the fact is, we Madisonians tend to treat this Saturday market differently than say a person shopping at a local farmers market in France. Most people who come to this one don't walk with a shopping list for the week. More often, we buy something that looks especially good -- better than you would find at the grocery store. This happens in part because the market is so colorful, so pretty to look at, that it has become a real magnet for visitors. By midmorning, it is hugely crowded and hard to navigate if you're just there to buy your produce for the week. Still, many of the vendors do sell out. Perhaps not potatoes or onions, but those moonglow pears that you wont find at the grocery store. Or fresh oyster mushrooms harvested just in the last day. Or corn, or asparagus, or eggplant in all shapes and sizes. We buy these and worry about fitting them into our bags and strollers and walk away feeling that we've brought a little of a farmer's best bounty with us to our kitchen tables.


(farmette fall: an abundance of nasturtium blooms!)






(cheepers come a visitin'!)






(when I walk the farmette lands, they follow)







Late in the afternoon, Ed and I decide that this weather just cannot be wasted: we go back to our old hidden tennis court among the pines and play a robust game all the way into the early evening.

Happy fall to all of you! Here, at the farmette, we're off to a grand start to the new season!

Friday

It is one of those Fridays where Ed has a techie meeting on the other side of town. Our morning schedule is focused on that, since for once, one of us has to be somewhere at an early-ish hour. If yesterday was damp then hot, today is windy and cool.







Still, we eat breakfast on the porch. I tell Ed that we should enjoy the last porch meals. He's not convinced that warm air is behind us. There is always a return of summer in autumn, he reminds me.





And then he goes off on his motorcycle, which he'll ride until a frost or a snowfall will ice the roads and make it difficult for him to stay upright.


In the afternoon I pick up a sleepy Snowdrop. You could say that the bracing air revives her.






(Cheepers we don't have anything for you!)






(Lets play store. But first I have to write a few things...)






Sleep is a funny thing: it runs along its own track. In the morning, I always get up before Ed. I tiptoe about but even so, almost always I wake him.  Snowdrop, too is a light sleeper at night. A storm, even one far away inevitably will wake her. Me, I'm a light sleeper all the time, except in the evening when we're watching TV. Its booming sound has no impact on me: I sleep.

When I pick up Snowdrop at school today, she is just ending a nap. And  despite the tumult, she naps right there on the floor with kids running around, grownups talking, chairs banging. When we come back to the farmhouse, we find a tired Ed. By late afternoon, despite Snowdrop's boisterous play in the same room, he is sound asleep, waking up later to ask -- where is the little girl? Did she leave?







(Loud and happy)






In the evening, I make chili. Ed comments -- it's been such a long time since you've made it! 
Well of course. Who eats chili in the heat of summer! Tonight, on the eve of fall, we dig in.

Thursday

Well, the bugs are everywhere. The farmette is still tolerable (those garlic and peppermint mists do have an impact), but we're getting our small share too. It's just a reminder that summer has its tricky sides. Or, to put it more broadly -- every season brings with it its own challenges.

Of course, Autumnal Exquinox is this Saturday. We should be moving on to "crisp" and "brilliant" and "colorful." We're not doing that. We are a little stuck in the inbetween: the worst of summer stays on and the glory of Fall hasn't quite arrived.

In the early morning, I step outside to a hoard of hungry girls. Okay, okay, okay! Calm down! I'll get you your grub!






They're never satisfied though. When Stop Sign comes calling for his cat chow, they insist on sharing. Audacious chickens! A cat can swipe your silly noses in a flash!
But he doesn't do that. The truth is, he's a little intimidated by them.






In the garden, I find the occasional day lily. I want to tell them -- you don't have to perform now. Get some rest and come back full of blooming energy next summer!






Breakfast. We're supposed to have a bubble of very warm air, but curiously, it doesn't come until late afternoon and it leaves soon after, in the late evening. The morning is cool. We eat indoors.






Afterwards, we have some work to do at my Mom's place. She has been amazingly independent, especially the week I was away, but she is stuck on some things that we can help move along and so we do that today.






And of course, in the afternoon, there is Snowdrop.





She hasn't had a solid period of play at the farmhouse in a while and so she gets right to it. I watch, adding mostly irrelevant comments to her story. I'm impressed with her dexterity! How can a three year old's hand have the patience to arrange these tiny Lego bits and pieces?






Very quickly she ropes Ed into her games. Here, she tells him she is running a machine shop. She has "constructed" three machines that will make "so many things!"





She can keep going for a long time like this, adding props, adjusting her story.

Toward evening, her parents and Sparrow come to pick her up. Oh, it's been a while since I've seen the little guy! Snowdrop, too, is always very happy to have him near her. Can I hold him standing up? -- she asks. I don't think so, little one. Not yet.






He is a smiling, laughing child. But at 3.5 months, well, he's just working on sitting up!






(Hey, I'm no slouch!)






Then someone suggests that we just pick up a pizza and make a farmhouse supper of it.
You mean we can have a pizza party? At the farmhouse? Tonight? Snowdrop is overjoyed.





We linger (with Sparrow) on the porch. It's suddenly very very warm outside. As if summer decided it wasn't ready to hightail it out of here yet. Snowdrop follows Ed inside and we can hear her dealing with her troublesome babies. She comes back to the porch then and tells us to please talk in whispers as we're keeping her kids up.





Ed goes out to put the cheepers away. Can I come? Can I come??
Of course. 
The two of them set out toward the barn.
So why does she love this nighttime routine? What does she do when you put each of the hens in the coop? 
Oh, she just likes to watch. Sometimes she'll pet them a little. Or play with the flashlight. On the walk back, she'll take a raspberry leaf and put it over the light to make it green. Or she'll ask to pick a purple aster.





Farmette stuff. Lovely evening serenade to the end of summer.

Wednesday at home

My, but it's quiet here! Shockingly so. I think it's because we had a summer of (construction) noise and my week away was so concentrated on cities. Today -- a gray and somewhat serious looking day -- everything is very very still.

I never have much of a jet lag on the return: sure, I wake up early and get sleepy early. Sort of like getting ten years older in a handful of days!  As I walk the farmette land at dawn (somewhere there, behind the cloud cover), I take in what is still blooming.






But you can't coax many photos out of me today. The garden looks pretty grim right now. It's not for an absence of color. The golden yellow helianthus sunflowers and blackeyed susans, the persistent pink cosmos, the purple of the little asters -- they look so seasonally appropriate! Lovely, in fact.


 


Still, most of the summer flowers in the beds are over and done with. I should take a good pair of sheers to them. Maybe this weekend. Not today.

As always, Ed had slipped into his guy habits in my absence (though these days, he knows he can buy himself at least a few appreciative smiles from me by merely turning on his robotic vacuum cleaner just before I arrive). I don't mind. It's his space too after all and if he can have a vacation from my oversight and tidying tendencies every now and then, I'm sure we're both the better for it.

But it does mean that "tidying" is on the top of my list for the next day or two. (Ed, did you notice that there is a dead mouse at the bottom of the stairs to the basement? No? Oh, well then. I'm informing you now.)

Breakfast, with whatever sad looking fruits he left for me, for himself...





Grocery shopping is also a must immediately after I return!


In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop. The girl had been sick while I was away and so I am especially happy to see her bouncy and chipper once again. Initially, she and I play upstairs. Ed is busy with a work issue and his unavailability throws her off a bit. But not for long. When he is finally free, she is thrilled.





Snowdrop is, as ever, full of stories. If I had to use just one word to best describe Snowdrop right now, it would have to be imaginative! She is unbelievably imaginative.

"Irrepressible" is good too. The stories are always bubbling over.

Wednesday is storybook ballet class day. She has learnt in school not to just speak out when she wants to say something. She is not shy about jutting her hand up to be heard.






(But she is also a very good listener.)






Trying out a dance for today's story.... (The book was about Raggedy Ann and Andy.)






Exploding with glee...






Afterwards, her mom joins us for a snack across the street at Pasqual's. Here, Snowdrop has to wait for my daughter and me to catch up a bit.






But not for long. She wants to contribute too.






And she does.


 



And so I'm home. That place that I always think about when I'm away. With good reason. The heart's here. It's that simple.