Thursday

Summer days for me are never lazy, rarely hazy and honestly, not that crazy. I remember when I traveled from Poland for a summer in Connecticut (How did that happen? Read about it in my book, Like a Swallow!). I thought then -- wow, this place is muggy and warm, but there is never a day when you didn't feel like the air was closing in on you. There was, every day, a haze. An oppressive haze. I missed the crispness of a blue sky.

Here, in Wisconsin, the skies are often without a trace of the mid-Atlantic mistiness. Today is a classic example of it: bright and beautiful.

Okay, not hazy. They're also not crazy because I rarely travel far in July and August. I try to avoid vacation crowds, at the airports and elsewhere, and, too, I grow my flowers for these months. I wouldn't want to leave them for too long when they are in their most splendid moment.

And of course, not lazy, because there is endless work to do outside. Today, once again, I stepped out early and picked up a hose and snippers and got to work, finishing just before it was time for me to get Snowdrop.

(water on the plump buds of a day lily)

(The meadow project in the new orchard)

(There's always time for breakfast.)

 

The girl said she wanted some outdoor time and I was happy to go along with this. We headed to the young orchard. Two draws there right now: the meadow (where the scent of Sweet William was just intoxicating!)...

... and our cherry trees. She loves these ripe fruits straight off the tree. She calls them sun-warmed and they really do taste like they still have some sun in them!

(Inside, she goes after the blueberry muffins with a vengeance. No one loves those muffins more than Snowdrop.)

Evening. Ed and I work outside again, then retreat as the light fades. The fireflies fill the courtyard, as if in celebration of all that lies ahead. We put away our tools and go inside. Deep breath of night air, exhale. One more time: in... and let it go. Until tomorrow.

Wednesday

If you ever need proof that the best you can do for your kids is set a kind example, just watch the world of chickens. It's always like this: you put new young chicks into an existing flock and the older ones gang up on them. They become mean. They peck and chase. The little ones are scared and flustered. Eventually things settle down. More or less. As they say, the pecking order has been established. And then, some time later, you add newer younger chicks, and the very ones that were clobbered just months before turn on the new ones and peck and chase and scare the delights out of them. They learned to be mean.

Ed says that this is just a natural ordering that contributes to the survival of the entirety. I have to think he'd never been bullied in his younger years or he'd be as mad as I get at the instigators of the coop warfare. Indeed, this morning -- a brilliant sunny morning...

... I check on the little ones. Cherry (from last year's additions) follows. The minute she sees them, she starts the chase, the peck, the clobber. Ed would tell me to leave them alone, but I never do. So I interfere with the natural order of things. So be it. Cherry chases the Bresse hens, I chase Cherry. It is a loud set of minutes!

Okay, time to settle in for a summer breakfast. And time to bake blueberry muffins! Bake first, eat after.

Time to also celebrate one of the younger kids finally getting a Covid vax! (Three more have to wait a couple of weeks.) Such a long wait! So much relief...

And as every day this week, I roll into a day of play/read/eat with Snowdrop.

In the evening, Ed rides his bike, I meet up with my older girl for a rehash of life's issues. We haven't done that in such a long time! We're trying to make this a regular habit going forward.

And then we have a sports event to go to. The Blue Jays have their first scheduled game -- against the Robins. This is soft ball, not quite at the league level, but still, well coached and with t-shirt teams! That counts for something, no? These girls' teams, ages 6 - 8, have been practicing all spring. 

None of us have watched Snowdrop play. She goes to practice with a friend and all we know is what she will report after. Recently she tells us that her coaches like her batting. But of course, what does that mean? All kids need encouragement. So tonight, I am a tiny bit surprised that she actually is good at batting! I remember the bat and ball Ed and I had for her some three or four years back. I'd never seen anyone less inclined to practice hitting that ball. Tonight, on the other hand, she had one miss. Hit the rest.

So often, kids surprise you: you peg them as one thing and it turns out their reach is so much greater...

And these two? Where are they heading in life?

I'm not making any guesses. Sky's the limit right now. For all my grandkids.

Summer nights, summer days. They have a touch of stardust, a touch of the sublime. So easy just to throw on a t-shirt, shorts and head out, in flip flops. So pretty to look this way, and that way, and always find something to admire. And to think the lily season has yet to begin! So many buds out there! So many flowers waiting to bloom for us.

Tuesday

Happy happy June 21st! Love this long day, when our sun sets at 8:41 pm (and rises at 5:18 a.m.). So many hours of beautiful light! (15 hours and 23 minutes of it here in Madison Wisconsin.) I mean, hot. But bright!

We are well aware of today's expected heat. Ed is up before 6 in the morning, digging up courtyard soil and laying it under the willow where we hope to plant some nourishing grasses for the chickens. It's not a job you can easily do on the hottest day of the year, so he starts early.

In taking a break, he comes upstairs and tells me that the chickens are restless. They want to be out of the coop. Because it will be the first day out "in the wild" for the four new ones, we have to stay with them for a while and watch for signs of trouble. What trouble, you ask? Oh, the cats.

When the chicks are young, the cats are really tempted to chase them. At some point they cease and retreat. Full grown chickens are too threatening: cats steer clear of them. But that magic line that separates the hunted from ones you flee from is loosely drawn and we're not quite sure the new chickens are past the age of temptation. So we open the door of the coop and we watch. And a few of the cats watch too. And the swallows hate all this because quite suddenly there's a lot going on in the barn and their young ones have just hatched.

Still, we wait and watch for a good long hour until we are satisfied that everyone is safe.

So far so good.

I turn my attention to the flowers. The tubs and the newbies need to be watered again. Too much heat!

Breakfast is on the early side. While it's still not ridiculously sizzling out there.

Phew, what a day! I need more sleep and less heat. Possibly we all need that!

Once again, in the late morning I pick up Snowdrop at art class. We check in on the Bresse chicks. All good so far...

I would be a poor care giver today if I did not take Snowdrop to the pool. I mean, on the hottest of hot days? How could you not! 

For the first hour, I stayed with her in the pool. 

After playing around in the deeper water, she turned to me and asked -- Gaga, can you dive off the high board? (In truth, I would call it a medium board.)

And I thought to myself -- as you get older, you stop doing things. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. The strange things is, I sometimes have this dream about diving off a (medium) board. I suppose it's one of those unfinished business things. I never perfected a straight dive. In my dream as well, I keep trying, but it's never perfect. Good enough, but not perfect. And when was the last time I dove off a board? I couldn't possibly tell you. Fifty years ago seems right. 

Snowdrop's question stumped me. I'm nearly 70. The impulse is to say no, not any more. But she asked with such belief! The girl is not competitive. We talk about mutual interests, like writing and we conclude we are a team of writers! In swimming, she is not where she wants to be. Maybe what I can do for her is show confidence.

So I dive. 

And luckily I don't break my neck doing this and she is beaming and I am happy that I took that plunge. 

Evening calm. We survived the hot day and so did the new chickens. Putting them in the coop turns out to be a breeze. (It helps to do this in the evening when they're woozy. But if you wait too long, the predators reach them before we do. It's all a balancing act. Sort of like life itself.)

I bake a frittata with the tail end of this year's asparagus. With garlic scapes and local oyster mushrooms. Summer treasures. Yes, we are officially both feet into summer.

Happy Solstice!

With love.

Monday

Every once in a while farmette living will put us smack in the thick of a questioning and soul searching about what it is that we are doing here. It doesn't happen very often -- after all, we are not really farmers -- but working the land and watching others work their land nudges us to think deeply about stuff that normally belongs in philosophy 101 textbooks. 

Take the wetlands next to us. They provide habitats. And generate mosquitoes. And swallows. What are we doing to survive alongside these creatures? On the farmette as well, we are always talking about land use. The trees we need to plant. The way to destroy invasive without poisoning the water tables. The trees we need to save because maybe they are in communication with their neighbors -- helping them grow. Our own well water: what's in it? It's very hard water -- full of mineral. But we wont soften it. All that salt, going into the soil! So destructive.

And of course -- the things we plant here. Who does it help? Is there harm in planting a flower that properly belongs in another region altogether? I face this all the time as I seed meadows and order flowers online. Ed is an ardent environmentalist and I'm not far behind. Too, he is more respectful of animal life than just about anyone I know. And he backs it up with a steady commitment to organizations that advocate to protect animals. Cats, snowy leopards, you name it.

So how is it that we decided to raise American Bresse chickens for meat consumption?

It's complicated and we have thought and talked a lot about it in the past week. Both of us are pretty firm (and have been for decades) about avoiding meat in our diet, and when we eat it, we'll check on where it comes from, buying only that which we know to have been humanely raised and butchered. We are not perfect in this (sometimes life puts in front of you a dish of unknown meats), but we're pretty good. 

But now comes the issue of chickens.

When we started keeping them (some half dozen years ago), it was for the eggs. Too, we're convinced that they deplete the tick population. We let them free range all day and we think of them as dumb but happy birds.

Except for perhaps Java (a wonderful mother hen type that was with us for years, only to be snatched by a predator not too long ago), we are not really attached to any of them. I know people love their hens. We just sort of coexist with ours. Sometimes they make us laugh. Mostly they just poop up my pathway and dig up my spring plants so I grumble a little, clean up the mess and forget about them.

And then last week Ed proposed that we raise broilers. For their meat. Not just any broiler, but the French Bresse chicken -- which, by the way, cannot be called a French Bresse bird here, because, well,  you know how the French are about their terroir. It's not champagne if it's not from the French region where champagne is produced and it's not a Bresse chicken unless it was raised (lovingly I'm sure) in the Bresse region of that country. But, this rare bird has now also been hatched in America, only it is called American Bresse. It's the same breed: the red white and blue chicken that mimics the French flag! (And the American, obviously, but we'll let the French keep the commercial selling point.) It has white feathers, a red comb, and blue legs. And it's meat is exceptional. Like no other. A real delicacy.

I wont go into the details of our discussions, but they were long and had a lot of back and forth. I'm still not sure we are cut out to keep broilers. But we can't be hypocritical. We eat chicken regularly. We should be able to raise our rare Bresse chicks for the table! (Especially since you wont find them at your local grocery store. Even in a frou frou grocery store. They are very hard to come by on any side of the ocean.)

All this is just my lengthy introduction to the fact that early this morning, after a very quick walk to feed our animals...

... we drove to a farm that shockingly is only forty miles south of us. And it raises American Bresse chickens. You cannot pass on such coincidence! So close! With pullets for sale!

We picked up four hens (just in case we don't butcher them -- we'll keep them as egg layers). And we drove home and put them in an enclosure outside. (They are about 8, maybe 10 weeks old.) 

Because of bird flu, they've not spent anytime outside yet. I'd say they were pretty dumbfounded by the experience. Our existing pack was pretty curious about the whole affair too.

One step at a time. For now, we have 8 hens and one rooster living here on farmette lands.

A pause for breakfast...

And then I drive out to pick up Snowdrop from cartoon drawing class. Did I tell you it's hot outside? By tomorrow we'll be breaking records. Really, really hot. 

She is used to us bringing new chickens into the mix. These are especially beautiful I think. We admire them for a good long time.

(And then we pick cherries in the new orchard!)

Inside: read, lunch, play.

Wait a minute, Snowdrop! That book is not quite meant for your demographic! Still, she is curious, so I let her continue for a page or two. It's easy enough to pull her away for a spirited game of camp. 

In the late afternoon I take her for her first ever tennis lesson. I know, I know -- it's hotter than hot. Tennis courts are notoriously steamy on such days. Still, she perseveres.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if she learned to love the game! Like skating (which, by the way, took place just steps away from these courts), it requires little equipment and offers a lifetime of beautiful sport. You never know where a kid's interest will take her. So far, she is on board.

In the evening, Ed and I have the job of picking up the four new girls and putting them into the coop with the others. It turns out to be far easier than we had thought. We do wonder -- once they are let loose into the fields tomorrow, will they be equally easy to corral into the coop or will they wander off and hide? Ah the mysteries of raising free-ranging chickens!

Excuse me while I go get a glass of cold water. Did I tell you? It is beastly hot outside. Surely records were set even today.

Good night, with love....

Sunday

I'll tell you what kind of a day it was: the kind where I go out early to feed the animals and never return inside. Or, not until well after noon. 

(A good morning kiss between the two cats who really like each other)

It's beautiful out there. And shockingly, totally shocking the daylights out of us -- the mosquitoes have gone away. Oh, maybe a few remain, but I sure did not notice any in all my time outside.

(The big bed has a profusion of white flowers right now...)

There is plenty of weeding that I must do to keep up with flower field maintenance. Not really big stuff -- I'm keeping up with it pretty well -- but plenty of fast growing spreaders that should be pulled, roots and all, by hand, again and again until the growing season nears the end. 

And, too, I need to water the newcomers. Young plants that have small roots can't take a week or two of piercing sun without a refreshing water soak. And so I give them that this morning too. And let me tell you, this is totally enjoyable stuff. Perfect weather, few bugs, plenty of birdsong, with the occasional dart of humming birds, swallows and dragonflies. I mean, bliss!

(One day lily starts its robust blooming period right now! It's Bitsy, with small blooms on tall spikes)

Breakfast is in the lunch hour. On the porch. Kolache from yesterday's brew pub (they're Eastern European milk buns with cheese and jam), and delicious berries from the farmers market. Can it get any better?

Toward evening, the young family is here for dinner... 

... and believe it or not, this is the first time that we can eat it outside, on the porch.

All three kids love June fruits!

And speaking of June fruits, after dinner, Ed and I noted our evening visitor to the new orchard.

She gracefully arched her neck and we looked to see what she was after. 

And what a surprise -- it was the cherries! Just a couple of days ago, they were barely noticeable, but with a few days of sunshine, they ripened quickly.

Thanks you for showing us what's growing in our own orchard!

We go to bed on the early side. Tomorrow, we need to be up and out at a beastly morning hour. On a mission to get some red white and blues, only the French kind. More on that in my next post!

Good night!