is this the day?

When is the peak, the high tide, the day that marks the very best moment of my flower fields? It's a tough call, because no two years are alike and I can't tell for sure where this is all heading. We could still be climbing or we could have hit the tippy top. Then, too, if a strong rain hits us, we could have chaos in the fields. Still, judging by the look of things, by the weather report, and by my spent lily pickings (415 this morning), I'm guessing that it is somewhere between now and the end of next week.

The best of the best, finest, the most colorful. Impressionistic, passionate, sublime. 

It's not that the past months weren't beautiful or that the next ones wont bring something special to the farmette, it's just that when I plant stuff, indeed when I purchase baby flowers, I imagine them as they will appear this week, when most (though by no mean all ) lilies are in bloom.

So it is no surprise that today, I focus on the fields all morning long. Not only do I snip and tidy, I also water much of what's there. (It has been a terribly dry season.) In all -- it's a four hour effort to get most of the fields to their best possible presentation. 

I have photos of course, but I'm keeping it tame for now. You have to show restraint or else it just becomes one undifferentiated mass of color. Nothing wrong with that, but if you want to really take in the small beautiful details, you cant blind yourself or the Ocean reader with excessive photos every single day of the  high season.

Okay, here's what I especially loved from today:

(Is there a better set of hues for a flower?)

(The oldest and densest lily bed is really filling up...)

(How about these incredible blossoms? Stunning!)

(From the porch, looking out...)

(From one corner of the Big Bed)

(From another corner of the Big Bed)

(Blushing beauties, all in one bunch...)

Breakfast, well after the noon hour.

Toward evening I head up to my daughter's home. The two older kids are away still, but Sandpiper is around. While my girl and I visit, he entertains us with his grins and games.

(At the water table)

(Playing ball: at age one, I'd say he's pretty good at it!)

My daughter was telling me about a new habit she has: along with a few friends, she records the sweetest moments of the day -- ones where you really pause and take note of something particularly beautiful. A moment when you savor something exquisite. What an incredibly clever idea! She read me some that have been recorded and I have to say, I was mesmerized by them! It's as if I was there, seeing that child's gesture in a raspberry patch, feeling the utter perfection of a passing breeze. Maybe there was a scent of honeysuckle, or merely of dry grass. Or maybe it was inside the house, when a piece of music caused you to do a small dance or transported you to another time and place that you'd not thought about for a long time. Precious fragments of a day! They tend to slip by often unnoticed. Unless you make a point of noticing them.

With love...

nothing but flowers

I wake up, step out and think -- who needs words when you have flowers. Who needs breakfast when you have flowers. Who needs pickle ball when you have flowers. You get the point: growing flowers serves many purposes and doing so can feed your soul and calm your raging bull and also, at the end of the day, fill the pages of a blogpost.

It's fair that this should be the content now. My days aren't merely filled with flower care, but much of what is good in them resides in the flower fields. 

[Other stuff? I have been tracking various people's Covid infections -- how delightful, right? And I have been ruminating about how difficult it is to be a funny person when you aren't genetically predisposed to be a funny person. A humorous gene, you'll tell me, does not exist. The talent to entice laughter is shaped socially. Go ahead and debate that if you wish, all I know is that there are some people -- admittedly not very many -- who can knock your socks off with their clever twist of a story that leads you to chortle right out loud and I am not one of them. But I can, on this July day, get you to smile! Not with words, but photos. Of flowers. Here we go!]

(By our back door, which, for us, is the only door...)

 

(From there, I take the secret path...)

(Along that path: an unusual lily, with two varieties joined as one...)

(And now for the lily field in front of the porch... Remember: each lily lasts only one day...)

(There are tiers of flowers: the lilies are at the top)

(Viewed from the side...)

(Okay, now let's follow the path toward the barn... hey, Uni, are you cleaning Happy's feather's? You are! You don't have to do this you know! In the background: a corner of the Big Bed)

(Wait, let's backtrack a little and show at least a tiny edge of the bed I hardly ever photograph: the one facing the road. This bit is all yellow and white...)

(And how about the field to the west of the porch? It's very shady these days and yet the monardas and lilies and cone flowers persevere...)

(Okay, back to the Big Bed...)

(This is where I put in the holly hock... waiting for it to blossom upwards... )

(A digression from a distant bed: out of the many experimental seeds I put in, there was this bean that grew to be taller than the branches of the crab apple...)

(Turn around and look across the Big Bed to the farmhouse...)

(Just one beautiful clump, out of many...)

(Finally, breakfast. Alone: Ed is out of town. A rare thing indeed.)

(If ever I'm going to butcher these hens, Bold Beatrice will be the first to go. She follows me everywhere if I stray toward the barn, the tomato field, the lavender patch. I trip over her all the time. She wants corn. Pesky and bold! But with a sweet side... Sigh...)

(One last one: the meadow in the new orchard. wild and beautiful...)

And there you have it! A day of nothing but flowers.

And love...

flowers

They waited for me, my dear, dear lilies. Most of them will have their field days this week and even into next week. This then is the moment for flowers. Glorious and beautiful, rich with the colors of summer. Expect Ocean to devote most of its time and space to them. It's just the way it is. (Besides, the grandkids -- all mostly healthy at this point -- are ensconced in family trips and programs, so that I keep them on my radar screen and I track their movements, but from afar.

Oh, hemerocallis lilies, you are magnificent (and especially when growing next to the phloxes, monardas, lilium, and clematis, because communities of flowers are like communities of people -- enriched by the presence of those not entirely like the other)!

I step out early and immediately I start in on the garden clean up. I'm not in peak season yet, but with my absence, the spent flowers have hung limply on the stalks and I quickly snip them off because it really, really looks better that way. Total amount snipped? 691. 

It's a stunning day, with plenty of sunshine and the morning is pretty as can be!

And here's a strange but pleasantly so surprise -- in the morning, the swallows are back. Did they forget something? Did they feel the air to be too warm and so they came north again? Are these distant relatives of the ones who were here before? A mystery! 

Breakfast, yes of course. On the porch, with the delicious fruits of the season -- peaches and blueberries.

Some more work, and tidying, of Ed too! (Meaning I trim his gorgeous gray hair and shave off his beard.) And then I ask him if he wants to tag along to Eugster's Farm with me. They're just under ten miles from our farmette and they have the first crop of corn for sale. Having tasted this year's corn in Chicago, I'm hungry for more and our guys just down the road aren't ready to harvest yet. 

It's not hard to convince me to hop on his motorbike with him. I mean, on a warm day, on rural roads -- it's just a heavenly ride. With views!

At Eugster's we are tempted!

Yes, by the corn. But also by their sunflower bunches. And watermelon. This is when you begin to regret taking a motorbike. Can we fit it? We have to! However, on the trip home we take a tiny detour to check out the Ortega family's small greenhouse. They sell flowers and we're curious what they're growing. And of course, I cannot resist picking up just a couple of pots, including one of a very very tall and unwieldy hollyhock. My seeds did not take this year, possibly because the cheepers were scratching in the place I put them.  This one would be just perfect for the Big Bed. 

Now how on earth am I going to manage this on the motorbike?

I do, but Ed is forced to go very slowly and by the end of the short ride, my arms are stiff!

So I plant and I transplant and I move some plants and the day passes very quickly!

(Cookie break: with cookies from Chicago's bakery -- a very sweet memory for me...)

Ed tells me -- it's a beautiful place we live in, isn't it...

Indeed it is.

leaving Chicago

When my youngest grandchild, Juniper, first came down with stuff, we assumed, well, I assumed that she caught it from her sister who had had something similar just days before. And maybe she did. But then, maybe, too, she added to the mix something from school. Why is this even significant? Because yesterday evening it was evident that Primrose was picking up symptoms of some of the stuff Juniper was now slowly getting over. Or maybe Primrose had gotten something altogether new from her school? (Because the symptoms track Juniper's, we can assume it's not Covid, but of course, we can't be sure. Time will tell!)

This is the way it is with young kids: they toss bugs between themselves as if it were a volley ball game, only sometimes there's more than one ball on the court. All this drives many parents, especially working parents, which is to say most parents, but particularly those working and living in the US where time off to actually parent is regarded as some kind of luxury rather than necessity -- all this leads them to say "I am physically incapable of adding more kids to the mix. We stop at two." 

My daughter hasn't had a night without multiple babe crying episodes sprinkled throughout for several days now and last night Primrose added her share of wake-ups to this, so that their mom was up and down and back and forth between the two kids, running on who knows what ounces of energy. (At night, though I never sleep through such stuff, I am of little help. The goal is to get the kids as quickly as possible back to sleep and the best person for that job is, unfortunately, the parent.) 

Going forward, Juniper is way better and one hopes this wont drag down Primrose, so that the household can eventually return to some level of normality in the week ahead. But it's been one interesting (challenging!) set of days. 

(not well)

It's a cool Sunday in Chicago. Again our plan for the morning has to be adjusted as Primrose has to see a doc to get the meds she needs. Still, we all find time to play and have a lovely breakfast and all in all, being home with these two silly-billy girls is always awesome. 

(while the big sister is attending to her health care needs, the little sister stays at home with me; I give her a bath then dress her in sunflower yellow, to cheer things up a bit!)

("hey, I'm plenty cheerful!")

(the last selfie...)

(Primrose is back! A little better, but she still has a stretch of recovery before her.)

(at lunch: that adoring gaze of the younger sib...)

I hate to leave my daughter alone with two only marginally well girls, but I no longer feel confident in driving long stretches at night, so I time my departure in the way that I can get home before I zonk out and certainly before sunset. In any case, the dad is on his way home. No flight delays for him, airline, you hear??!

And now I'm back at the farmhouse and I see that lilies have indeed exploded in the past couple of days! I almost want to avert my eyes. So many spent lilies to snip tomorrow! But that is in fact tomorrow's work. Today I'm thinking about grandkids: so much to work through, so many tough moments any young family must navigate! But of course, at the end of the day it's the tough stretches that open your eyes to the pleasure of having a more carefree set of minutes. And when those carefree minutes roll in, you sit back, maybe close your eyes, and think -- isn't life just grand! 

With so much love...

Chicago

The weekend: it is that break and rest that you get for working at your job (in most jobs) or going to school. You abandon someone else's imposed schedule and create your own.

Some of us are so programmed, so wedded to the weekday clock that we find this to be an insignificant change. We get up at nearly the same time, we eat meals that we're hungry for at the same hour. The older you get the more this is the case. So that even if you are retired and by definition not tied to that work ordering of your day, you do not do what you've longed all your tired adult work days to do -- you do not as a habit sleep in, you do not unravel your commitment to a set schedule.

So I am not surprised that this Chicago household, though looser at the edges, still gets up at close to a weekday hour and still aims to follow many of the routines of a weekday. It's just easier that way. Though the stress is nearly gone: no one will kill you if you slack off and get going later than you had wanted to.

Morning: breakfast, and a leisurely vibe. Us older guys eat granola. Juniper tries oatmeal with peanut butter to test her peanut tolerance.

(Juniper and Primrose: good with each other, good for each other)

My daughter has the idea that we could walk to the Green City Market in Lincoln Park. It's one of Chicago's nicest farmers markets and it's only a brisk 45 minute trudge from where we are. I'm tickled with this expedition. I love local markets, especially now, in July, and I very much want to see how different this one is from our own. A Chicago market gets lots of produce from Michigan so I'll be able to see what's growing in Illinois and its eastern neighbor.

We set out. My daughter comments later that she looks stern in the photo. I think she looks determined!

It really is a cool walk. Chicago's neighborhoods are architecturally and historically and commercially interesting. Perhaps it's not a great plan to meander through all of them, but today's walk certainly ranks as a really good one. 

And the market is also a winner. It's along a U-shaped space, with lots of green grasses and shady spots for a blanket if you want to linger. And we do!

We pick up some bakery items and, too, some fruits from Michigan... 

... and I do see that there are for more fruit stands than we have and perhaps somewhat fewer veggie and flower stands. But the vibe is great and the foods are delicious. And guess what! I find a stand with this year's first corn! Definitely worth adding to tonight's dinner.

In the afternoon, the kids rest (Juniper cut her first tooth and this brings her a great source of relief -- she has struggled through teething and a set of viruses during my time here and it's nice to see her finally exhale some). I prepare the foods for supper. And what may that be? You wont be surprised if I say a spinach and mushroom frittata! I mean, talk about making something that I know from every angle! Besides, they have lots of good CSA eggs in their fridge.

(dessert: vanilla ice cream with blackberries, just like one in her book; if you're a kid you'll likely know which book)

Evening. Hard to believe it's my last one. Too, it's not as if everything is cleared up and everyone is good to go. But, the kids are *mostly* good to go (for now) and their dad will be coming home tomorrow.

In the meantime, bugs, viruses and all, it's been thrilling to be with these three! Such great girls they are! 

With so much love...