Friday

I used to tell Ed that the NYTimes tracked my stories here on Ocean, because every once in a while, out of the blue, an Ocean theme would appear a day later in some life style section of the pager. Hey, that was my idea! Of course, one other way to look at it is to recognize that there are only so many topics of general interest or discussion in our lives and we just keep going around the same themes over and over again. We'd like to believe that we are original, clever even, but we're not. Everything has been lived before and certainly stated before. 

That sense of repetition and a parroting of an Ocean theme was with me today when I looked at the paper and saw a story on contentment. Wait, didn't I just write about that a couple of days back? Without question we strive for that purposeful contentment, choosing to search for it through our connection to the natural world and more broadly, to my kids, to our friends. Didn't I just say something to that effect? And now the paper gives us this article about the Secret of Aging Well. (In case you don't have time to read it, it is about that: striving for contentment despite roadblocks/impediments/life's issues as you grow older.)

And then I notice the date on the article and I see that it is a rerun from an earlier moment in time, and I think -- my god, we really do just go around the same circle over and over!

Still, as Ed and I sit yet again for an extra long time on the porch over breakfast, watching those darn swallows...

... I tell him -- I'm sure glad you deliberately choose to be the way you are. I think he was a bit puzzled with that one, but then, he's used to me saying things that are a little whacky and out of the blue.

Breakfast was once again super late, but this time I had a legitimate excuse: Wisconsin is now home to ripe blueberries! Ed picked some up at the farmers market yesterday from Aggie our blueberry farmer. And so I baked. A blueberry-thyme yogurt cake. This one:

Speaking of life's repetitions, drum roll! It's time for your July viewing of the day lilies.

In larger groups now. Because really, it's not just a single lily that has us gasp, it's that they look so good together!

Right?

(Okay, just one closeup!)

In the afternoon, I pick up Snowdrop at camp once again. It's her last day of "Nature and Art," and I can tell that she has been as happy with this one as she was with Robotics Camp and Cartoon Art Camp and Softball. Kids love summer programs with new friends -- that has to be the conclusion here.

Today she is especially tickled because in the course of the morning, her last front tooth finally came out. As a person who takes many grandchild photos, I have tried hard to work around the fact that her baby teeth remained in place even as her big teeth had already come in. The dentist said -- give it until the end of the summer. Finally, today, she is rid of them and her smile is sweet and especially grown-up!

In the evening, Ed and I eat leftovers, just because they are there. We take our salads and reheated pizzas outside, because it is so perfect on the porch right now. The swallows swoop down, then soar above the tree tops and as the setting sun hits the bellies, for a brief second they look like specs of gold against a darkening sky. Brilliant and graceful. And each year, more of them build nests here and each year. we get this humbling show of their perfect flight.

Thursday

And so comes a summer Thursday on the farmette. Inevitably, our big stories of the day revolve around such topics as which animal did what to whom, and how one piece of machinery is useful or broken or in need of some part, with ongoing speculations about whether there are more mosquitoes (oh horror!) or bees (oh yay!) than there were yesterday, and about the rains that are needed, or that dumped too much water on everything. In other words -- we are full of farm talk. Real farm talk by two people who actually know very little about farming. Ed doesn't hesitate to insert his standard line -- "I lived on 68th street in New York City, what do I know about this stuff?!" [This always makes me smile. Can you imagine -- I used to catch the Lexington Ave subway home from school, picking it up on 68th street, just past his apartment house, every single day of my last school year in New York. It's not impossible to think that I may have bumped into him more than once. I would have been 12 or 13, he would have been 15 or 16. Obviously, we made no impression on each other.]

This morning he goes out to feed the animals (for a change) and then tells me that I forgot to move the brick, thereby leaving the cheepers trapped in the coop instead of releasing them at dawn (we have an automatic release on the coop which usually works brilliantly so that we dont have to get up to set them free). Oops. 

Me, I do my lily love walk, snipping spent heads and pulling weeds and taking the occasional picture.

(from singles yesterday to triplets today)

Snapping a photo does make me feel like the life of a lily bloom (so short! just one day!) is forever on record. There is in each flower so much to love!

Then we catch Uni (one of the medium aged hens) and hose down her butt. What can I say -- it looked really dirty. And after that appetizing chore, we sit down to breakfast. Late. Close to noon. This is a new normal for us!

Afterwards, Ed returns to clearing the barn. Oh, the junk accumulated there over the years! Fencing, netting, boards, boxes. Rods, insulation, bins, wires. Junk, in my view. Ed comes out of the barn these days looking like a  ditch digger or a person who navigates dust storms for all his waking hours. Filthy by anyone's standards. And because he owns only two pairs of shorts, I've had to do mini washes every couple of days. All I need is a laundry line and I'll feel myself to be a real farm Frau! (He'll say -- leave it alone. I will roll my eyes. No way is that stuff coming into our living room.)

The next big task for him is to try out the new ancient tractor that he picked up on Craigslist. He has gotten it to work now and he is eager to see if it will actually till the land out back, in between all those trees we planted. At first he didn't want to bother planting anything else there, but these days he feels committed to finding a good use of that acre of space. If it's tillable, we'll plant something. Deciding what will be a topic of conversation for many a meal to come. 

For now, I keep my focus on the lilies. Snip, weed. Snip weed. With the occasional longer pause to admire what's there.

(the Big Bed is slowly filling in...)

And I am happy to give it all a pause in the afternoon. Farming, or pretend farming is great, so long as it doesn't eat up all your waking hours. Picking up Snowdrop at nature art camp offers me the break I need from dirt and bugs and weeds and spent flowers.

(At the farmhouse)

In the evening Ed and I feel we deserve a pizza. Or, that I deserve not to cook. Or that Ed deserves break from my cooking. (I'm hoping it's not that!) I still make a salad, because we are salad addicts and because we have way too many cucumbers, both from our patch and from the CSA.

I have grand plans for meals ahead, but our warm dish of the evening comes in square boxes and it's delivered and we think that this is the most luxurious thing ever!

Summer days are full of work and ideas and dirt and cool drinks. This is why we love them so much!

Wednesday

Oh, we are prone to indulge excessively, aren't we... No small scoop of ice cream! We want a double on a waffle cone, or better yet, a triple, with sprinkles and chocolate sauce and a cherry on top. No one lily for me -- I'll plant dozens, wherever there is room and come July, I'll take one photo after another, even though there is such a thing as "too many lilies!"

Well, my patient souls, this is July for you. Ocean is going to be full of lilies. My life is full of lilies!

All around me I see their gentle blush and I think -- that fading rose tone, blending into a tangerine orange and a lemon yellow -- that's just exquisite!

Or, how about orange marmalade spilling into scrambled eggs?

With the lilies come the tree frogs.

Of course, my life is not just stuck in a pool of lilies (though how good does that sound!). First of all, July gives us other splendid blooms.

(I never thought of sweet peas as perennials, until mine showed up again and again and ... yet again.)

And I do have other thoughts running through my head and we eat summer meals and have summer moments on the porch...

And there was the inspection of the tomato field -- the tomatoes are splendid this year!

But there is no question about it: lilies are in almost all my July days and so, too, they will be in almost all your July days, Ocean readers! (I say "almost" because I will be away for a handful of them.) And that's not a bad thing. Remember, by February, we will all be starved for the beauty of a lily. Even just one lily. Perhaps this lily:

[I should say that I actually had a fuller day than it may appear here. For example, I picked up Snowdrop at Aldo Leopold Nature Center where she had the next in a series of summer day camps. This one focused on nature and art -- how fantastic is that! 

(pausing by the prairie flowers...)

Afterwards, she came to the farmette with me for her usuals. And then I drove her to her next activity: softball, on the Blue Jays team.

Her brothers are there to watch. And to get in their own practice runs.

I leave them all playing or watching or practicing softball. I head back to the farmette, and this time I do not speed home like crazy to avoid horrible storms. That was yesterday's adventure!]

In the evening, Ed bikes, I hum to myself -- luli luli lily! (That would be a goodnight lullaby in the Ukraine, with a lily twist.)

With love...

project no. 862

The farmette is a place of wonderful possibilities. And challenges. And, if you have an imagination and a will for it, the land has the ability to inspire you to run free with ideas on how to improve it and how to stay sane while you live and work here. Ed is a source of constant quirky ideas. And we are embarking on one that on the one hand makes sense, on the other -- well, it's quirky.

It comes from me gently prodding him to think of ways to improve our parking situation. In the summer, the afternoon sun comes in at just the wrong angle and it heats up the cars tremendously. No big deal for him -- he hardly ever drives anywhere at all in the summer, but a real nuisance for me as I cart the kids home in an overheated vehicle. In the winter, the problem is with the snow build-up. What lands on the cars can be swept off without much fuss, but the snows settle by the doors and over time they form a sloping mound of ice. It's slippery for the kids and it's slippery for me! So I've been suggesting for a while now that we put up some kind of roof or cover. 

In your average outdoor parking place, this should be easy. There are any number of sheltering option out there for cars. But the problem is that we routinely have huge truckloads of wood chips dumped at the end of the driveway. There's no other place for them. Big trucks have to be able to safely unload a cargo there, so that any thought of a permanent car shelter is unworkable. 

Ed never gives up that easily and lately he's been thinking that perhaps we could put up a very very sturdy and very very large shade umbrella over just my car. You know the type -- people use them on their decks for shade over a seating area or a swimming pool. The important thing is that the arm on which it rests can be anchored at the side and the whole thing is collapsable.

So now we have a new project: to clear the space by the parking area and to see if we can dig in an umbrella stand there. To do this, we have to pull out huge ancient hydrangea bushes. We did that yesterday and it was painful! Those bushes have runners like you wouldn't believe! 

What to do with the bushes? Me, I would have dumped them on our wood pile. Not so Ed. He begged me to come up with a landscaping idea where he could put these bushes in. I finally chose a space at the edge of the property, right by the prairie that the town is planting to the east of us. It's an inhospitable place to say the least! Clay soil, with thistle and wild parsnip growing like crazy. Today we tried to dig out all that crazy stuff and put in these poor bushes. Well, Ed did a big chunk of the work. I chased away deer flies and occasionally relieved him of the digging.

Stage two of the project will be putting in that umbrella. I honestly have a hard time believing that this will work, but I never say no to an offer of a solution to a vexing problem! (Umbrella is on order. Stage two will follow once it arrives.)

Breakfast, somewhere in there, between the digging and the mowing and the replanting.

The rain had given the flower fields a nice bit of moisture, but of course now we have the mosquitoes again. Not terrible, but still, very present. Nonetheless, I take a long stroll through the flower fields because finally, at long last the lilies are beginning to pop out!

And so I have my seasonal job: snip the spent flowers and admire the purity of the new blooms!

It truly is magnificent out there! We are just starting the color-filled flowering season, how good is that!

In the afternoon, the young family stops by (on their way home from Chicago) and Snowdrop stays with me for some missed hours of play. As I wait for them on the driveway, I notice (and the cheepers notice) that the next farmette fruit is ready for picking.

(She is shorter than a sunflower!)

I can't say we stay a long time in the great outdoors -- it's hot and muggy once again. Besides, she started a book here the last time and she was anxious to finish it.  

While she reads, I bake some cornbread.

No, it's not Thanksgiving! It just struck me that I ought to include a bean salad in our supper repertoire and a plate of bean salad seems like it needs an addition of something. Cornbread seems sensible for it, no?

Okay, pause in cooking so that I can drive the girl home and visit briefly with her brothers and mommy.

Back at the farmhouse, I'm in the kitchen again. Here's the newly developed salad, with black beans, corn, peppers, green onions and avocado. In a lime and olive oil dressing. I know, I know -- it will be even better with the fresh Wisconsin corn, coming to us in a couple of weeks! I had to make do with last year's stuff.

I think that using canned black beans is a bit of a cheat, but I feel noble enough making my own salad dressing. Besides, who's to know!

Storms outside, calm and quiet inside. A typical summer combination. 

A typical summer day.