Friday - 105th

And they're back!

I'm thinking of the clouds, the rains, the storms.

I'm also thinking of the two kitties -- Calico and Cutie, the sisters that keep being chased away by the teenage cats who call the farmette lands their home. (Cutie has actually been coming back daily for a feeding or two, but Calico has been gone for over a week. Every time I think she surely must be dead, she reappears, starving, thin, but happy to see me answer her incessant meows with a bowl of food.)






And I'm thinking of the return of Snowdrop's pictures, which she stopped working on for a while.

But again, I am getting ahead of myself. The day starts very early. With animals.






Some flower appreciation...






(that's a close up of this...)






And breakfast.






The kids come immediately after and even though it is lightly drizzling when they arrive, I push for a quick nature walk -- to the barn and back. They love visiting the coop and the adventure is made more exciting by the fact that Ed joins us there.











As we walk back to the farmhouse, the rain picks up, so we don't linger. And as I watch the two kids, I think to myself: who needs the other more? Your guess may be -- he does. Sparrow does everything Snowdrop does. She sits on a ball, he sits on a ball. She wants to go to art room, to read, to play with Legos -- he follows close behind.

And yet, I see in her a reliance on his presence that is touching. Even when she is pointing to his misstep -- gaga, he pushed me yesterday! -- she does it with an understanding that he is part of the family and the dynamics are complicated.
I have a hypothesis -- she tells me in the car and I smile at her choice of words. I think he pushed me because I had been wanting to do something alone and he was not happy about that.






As I said, Snowdrop is inspired to go back to drawing. This comes after reading the sweet, sweet Catwings stories (she begged to read through all four books at one sitting, but I believe in deferred gratification! If I have to wait a day for the next episode in my Crime Dramas, she must sweat it out too!) where a family of cats has wings. Her pigs in her super-pig sketches have wings. She is on it again!






It is the last day of the second week of Gaga's summer school and only now do I suggest to them a video after lunch. It's raining and I want them to have a bit of an easy moment. Olivia stories provide just that.






In the evening, it rains. And storms. And rains some more. I stir fry some fish, go back to my asparagus, and settle in with Ed for a quiet and lovely evening on the couch.

Thursday - 104th

So we're rolling in summer once again. You know how rains often clear away hot humid weather and usher in a cool spell? Well they did the opposite. Yesterday's storms chased away the brisk cool air and today we are back with the heat.

It's summer at the farmette.






But not yet July and so the garden still waits to really open up. (There's a reason why in past years I always took my travel break in the last weeks of June, coming back just in time for the flower power of July.)

(the sweet peas are just beginning to bloom)





I have the usual set of activities today: farmette chores, kids, food washing, file deleting on my overcrowded computer. But I do have a resolve: to get to Ocean writing earlier than in the past few days. Yesterday I did not finish until right about midnight and I did not have time to do a quick re-check this morning. As a result, I managed to bungle a paragraph and two photos and they sat there in a sorry state until I had the time late today to fix it.

I will try to do better.

Even as there is so much to do!

Let's start the day together with breakfast.






From there it's just a hop and a skip to the kids' arrival.











Our time outside is modest. The mosquitoes are starting to appear in the shade and the trucks are rumbling loudly on the plot of land next door that is supposed to be someday converted to community gardens. Sparrow thinks it's too noisy.

We go inside.






As we work through our Summer School program (loosely, very loosely), I think about how the kids are growing up quickly and how old worries seem so dated and new challenges are forever cropping up, only to fizzle the next day, or next month, or next year.



 


Today, for instance,  I notice that Snowdrop is unreasonably hard on herself when she draws. She has a vision. If the execution isn't up to snuff, she is despondent. Sparrow, on the other hand, has grown tired of running a marker back and forth across a page and way prefers these days to read a book than to slump over a blank piece of paper with a marker in hand.

Art class is very brief.






But the kids are bouncy and playful and Snowdrop has returned to making up games with her dolls and so Sparrow, too, will follow along and there is this cooperation now that grew out of many months of struggling to find a way to play side by side.






(farmette cherries make great earrings!)







Later, much later, in the early evening, Ed and I walk over to the plot of land just across the road from us. Much of it has been handed over for conservation as well as for educational farming.

It is like a painting right now. Stunning.







We return home to our evening chores, to animals clamoring for food and attention, to leftovers for supper and a quiet evening on the couch. So quiet that Ed falls asleep even before we're done with the night's episode of Stewart and Bailey.

Wednesday - 103rd

Will I remember this as the week of the cherries? We have an abundance in the fridge and today, the kids and I decided that a second of our four young cherries is producing fruit good enough to eat! The fruits are golden red, and delicious, and abundant. All we have to do is pick before the birds come after them.

But not first thing. We start the day with farmette chores, followed by breakfast...

(With all that rain, I do not have to water any pots)


 


We are still cleaning up after the morning meal when the kids arrive.

Our outdoor time begins with puddle making. Just because: the hose is there, the water trickles out. Everyone scatters.






And now this is when cherry picking enters into the game. We concentrate on a different tree -- one with the golden variety.






The girl's enthusiastic. The boy -- hesitant.










Do you want to climb the ladder?
No!
Do you want a cherry?
Yes...
Do you want to eat it? 
Silence. Cherry moves to mouth, mouth rejects cherry, gaga gets cherry back.

Still, it's thrilling to see the fruits. Cherries are your dainty lovely sweet delicacies. Lovely to the core.






A glance at the garden. Much of it is almost blooming!






Some of it is in full swing!






Inside, I suggest a butterfly art project. Snowdrop jumps to it, caterpillars, cocoons and all.






We're loosening our rigor a bit: the summer school schedule is malleable of course, but today we all but abandoned it. Snowdrop was heavily into dance...






Sparrow -- well, he has his books, his puzzles, his favorite Duplo characters who like to eat pancakes and doughnuts in the little Duplo Lego house, his flower towers...






Hmmm... two days without workbooks. That's a good sign! It tells me that Summer School is fun in its own right, no extra props required!

(Waiting for the lunch pizza to be done...)






Primrose joins us on FaceTime for lunch. It's a little out of sync, as the farmhouse kids are onto their dessert and the city girl is just digging into her sandwich, but it's great fun nonetheless to see her for these few minutes!












In the evening Ed gets ready to go biking. But as he pokes around, the clouds roll in, thunder rumbles overhead and the rains come down. Hard.

We just manage a quick walk to the young orchard (on the way, we pass the first newly planted day lily bloom)...






... we pick a few more of the golden cherries...










... and then all hell breaks loose.


Rainbow weather.






Time for a frittata! To the eggs I add asparagus, sauteed mushrooms with garlic scapes and green onions and plenty of cheese.





Such such a beautiful day. If only you didn't have to worry about the world around you! June really has been magnificent here, in south central Wisconsin. But of course, we do worry. A lot, for everyone. Even as the birds continue to sing and the flowers are more gorgeous than ever and the mushrooms and asparagus together are like the best symphony of spring flavors.

Tuesday - 102nd

What's the biggest time-suck in the world? Learning how to install/fix/operate something new on your computer. It    can    take    forever.

I can only say this: I'm glad I hadn't scheduled anything important for this afternoon, because I would have had that feeling of total panic as the minutes turned into hours turned into the rest of my day, as I struggled to use another Adobe photo editing program.

I had to do it. My computer is several years old and though I knew I would get into trouble sooner or later, I continued to work on photos imported onto its hard drive. How long would it be before I ran out of space? Oh, right about this long.

Please don't be an Ed and tell me to move everything to a backup device. I don't like them, I forget how to use them. I prefer having everything there, on my own screen, at my fingertips daily. And though all good photos are actually in a cloud storage on Flickr, that place is a complete mess. I have 53,843 edited photos (I've been s Flickr member since 2005), all in one chronological photostream. No order, no labeling, no albums, no organization. You try to find anything there. Can't do it? Ha! Neither can I.

So I opened up my cloud based Light Room, which, after all, is included in my Adobe subscription, and I stumbled. And it took me forever to get past step one, despite a valiant effort to google, search youtube, etc etc to get myself out of a frozen space from which I could not exit.





Okay, enough computer jabber. After all, it wasn't a complete waste of time: you learn something when you problem solve your way through an issue, but still -- a whole beautiful afternoon to learn one very trivial little detail. Uff!

Otherwise, the day belonged to the grandkids.

After breakfast of course.






Snowdrop, Sparrow and I cycled through the usual loosely set schedule of activities, but there definitely were some highlights: our nature walk, for example, put us straight into the new orchard, where Ed and I had set up a ladder. It was Snowdrop's first authentic cherry picking experience!






She learned that not all cherries come without bugs! (But most are beautiful and delicious, even though our harvest isn't huge.)






Sparrow wanted to pick as well and I let him do it by hoisting him up close to a cherry candidate, but the truth is, the little guy doesn't like cherries, as it's a FRUIT of all horrors, so he held onto it for a while, wondering if he should be happy or indifferent to the experience.






Eventually, we ate his cherry.

Inside, he wanted to paint, on her side of the easel. For two minutes and then he was done.






Then she wanted to paint, for one minute, before something else caught her eye.






There was a music class and thus far, Snowdrop had been good about going along with it (she is my one grandchild who does not absolutely love to sing), but today, she wanted a more active role in the guitar playing...






... and so of course then he, too, wanted a more active role in the guitar playing.






Still, it was fun and even though Snowdrop doesn't go around humming songs we sometimes sing here, she does remember them. I got reprimanded for skipping a verse from On Top of Spaghetti -- as song I had last sang several years ago. Too, she is by now quite adept at doing a credible rendition of Home on the Range. Sparrow -- well, he likes music, but is still not fully into the performance aspects of it.


And there you have it: a day that flew by at demonic speed. I could not believe it when I glanced at the clock and saw that it was time for dinner.

And what's there for us this evening? Well, I've got all this kale and so I followed the advice of my CSA farmers and sauteed some garlic scapes, potato onions and kale, threw them into a small baking dish, along with a bit of marinara sauce, crumbled feta on top, and cracked a couple of eggs over it all, and put it into the oven to bake.







Late evening. Quiet time again. In the summer, it's especially bewitching to bring the quiet of the outdoors into your home.

 


Living in the country makes that all too easy.

A stroll, a few minutes with the animals and then it's time to bring out the pop corn and lose yourself in the current fave British crime drama. Completely distracting, delightfully fictional, perfect when watched with with a nice glass of wine and an even bigger glass of fizzy water at the side.