storms and TV

Rain. Please, may there be some rain. And let me not regret this wish: we don't want heavy storms. We just need rain. Drizzle drizzle, pitter patter. Okay?

Eh, we have no say in these things. 

I continue to work outside in the morning, today in a steamy blanket of very humid air. I clip, snip, take a few photos...

And it's nice, it's calming, it's rewarding, except when I come across a big, very furry and very dead animal in one of the lily fields. Our best guess is that it's a groundhog. Sure looks like a groundhog. But why dead? It's not butchered by predators. It's not susceptible to lily toxins. One of those unsolved mysteries! I call Ed, who takes out the shovel and buries the poor guy in the old orchard.

And then we go out to Stoneman's Farm for their sweet corn. Their pearl 'n honey, beloved by so many of us, Wisconsin corn. It's the first day of the season for them (unless you count the sprinkling of early corn they had a week ago) and they are hopping! Their loyal customers have been waiting for this day all year long.

We buy a baker's dozen. That should keep us happy for half a week. We could come out every day for a freshly picked bunch of ears, but honestly, the difference between day old and three day old corn is so small to the average person (we are that average person), that we settle for a dozen. Wisconsin's treasure. Right up there with our cheeses!

Only after that burst of activity do we sit down to breakfast.

And then come the storms, giving us, well, not even an inch of rain. It stops by mid afternoon, which is a good thing because I have a Zoom call where background matters and I dont like any of our backgrounds at the farmhouse. I take it on the porch.

I dress carefully: a navy, gently flowered silky-looking top which I hope looks like a professional shirt, though it's really a dress, and a navy jersey blazer that honestly, you could scrunch up and put in a backpack, but it looks way more serene on camera. With a bee pin stuck in the lapel. As I come down, Ed looks at me with a pronounced frown. 

Gorgeous, you don't look like that! Are you sure you want to wear that?

Okay buster, I'm going to hurl one right back at you: I do look like that when I travel to Europe, but you wouldn't know because you never go with me.

But, but, you don't really look like that!

I'm thinking I've been hanging around the farmhouse too long. Shorts and t-shirt, all summer long. No, I am not going to wear a t-shirt advertising produce and prairie flowers! Forget it! I walk off, resisting the temptation to comment on his torn t-shirt. With Ed, the less you say, the less he digs into whatever stubborn point of view he wants to bring to the table. (To his credit, the second time I come down, after adding lipstick -- lipstick, of all things! something I haven't worn since my daughter's wedding!-- he does offer some "you look gorgeous, gorgeous" sweet words.)

What Zoom call is this anyway? It's a TV interview for my book (Like a Swallow) and I am of two minds about it: yes I know I need to talk up my book, no I don't like spending time on this. Besides, it's a live show on our local CBS News program, and I have to wonder who watches TV at 4 o'clock in the afternoon anyway. No one I know. But, the interviewing team is very cheerful, very pleasant and the questions are fine, and the whole thing passes by without a major calamity, which to me is about as much as I can hope for.

In the evening we eat leftover chicken and corn. I mean, is this a classic summer supper, or what? With tomatoes and cucumbers from the garden. This season offers such a wealth of good things! 

We are grateful.

the next day

I'm helping Snowdrop finish up her morning shower routines. As always, she notes the scale in the bathroom and steps on it. 

I'm 53.6! How much do you weigh, gaga?  Obligingly I step on it and we look at the somewhat higher number. At her age, more is always better and so she tells me, as if to cheer herself at how far she still has to go -- that's okay, gaga, someday I'll weigh more than you!

I think about this: it's true that she is on the tall side of the equation, but still, it's not a given. So I challenge her: maybe not... you can't tell for sure.

Of course I'll weigh more: like, when you're dead!

I laugh at this and still push back: my soul may way a million pounds! This is a tease and she knows it.

If that were true, you'd be a million pounds heavier now. You do have a soul, don't you?

Never argue with a seven year old.

Snowdrop is sleeping over at the farmhouse with her mom and they are up early. Both have to be at their respective places today (camp and work) by 9, but this extra time in the morning is precious: moods are great, the sun is out, the air is wonderfully cool. 

She goes out with me to feed the cats and cheepers. On the way to the barn she asks if we'd named all the Bresse hens yet. 

Just Bold Beatrice. I tell her. 

Can I name the others?

Sure. I explain to her that we weren't naming them if they were going to be eaten, but that butchering of the exquisitely marbled Bresse hens is getting remote. They have sweet dispositions and are graceful and low maintenance. We like watching them move around the farmette lands. 

How about Serene Cindy, Calm Carol and Magical Mary?

You got it. The chance of them appearing on our plates just took another sharp dip. 

We eat breakfast on the porch. Leisurely. I let her bring a book so she can linger afterwards...

And then it is time for me to drop them off and, yes, return to the farmette to snip lily heads. It's later in the morning -- the light is different, the air is getting warm.

And I like the change! No one should stay in a gardening rut!

The rest of the meals are a confusion of second breakfasts and early lunches and snacks and who knows what else. Eventually I coax Ed into taking out his saw to cut down some dead branches out front.

It's almost like lily snipping, but on a grand scale: everything looks so much better once the finished stuff is cleared away.

Dinner? Well, we have that chicken we purchased from One Seed Farm. A nearly six pound bird, acquired so that we could talk to the farmers for a few minutes about raising broilers. We got good advice that we probably will never use! Still, it's wonderful to taste their own free range broilers. Kind of felt like Thanksgiving!

And we do have some new stuff coming to the farmette pretty soon. Stay tuned: we're about to move France around the corner and introduce Mexico! Curious? Keep reading in the weeks to come. 

and many more...

So comes another month. A new calendar page! Sure, there are July leftovers everywhere -- leftover worries, leftover Covid issues, leftover this, leftover that, but still, we're in the thick of a glorious summer! How fantastic! 

But with the coming of August, I am done with counting lilies. I still snip -- there's lots to clean up out there -- but I also look down and start working on clearing the ground around the flower base. That's a neglected chore that I put off once the flowers bloom because, well, there's only so much I can do in a day.

But on this August first, I get back to growling at all the weeds that manage to insert themselves everywhere when my back was turned. Still, the weather is grand, even though there is a light cloud cover, so I don't know that my sour cherry sun drying project is getting much of good run right now. To my friend who lived in Denmark -- how did you manage to get those cherries dry in a country that rarely has several sunny days in a row??

Let's focus on the flowers:

I have other thoughts running through my head as I work my way through the flower fields, many of them related to daughters and specifically to the one who is celebrating her birthday today. As it happens, her family is a bit dispersed so that the celebratory plan is quite unusual: after time with friends on the Union Terrace, she'll come here with Snowdrop for a farmhouse cake and sleepover. All this mean that I should be baking a cake right now. Nothing complicated -- just the Maida Heatter FBI cake. I've been baking it for some forty years and it never fails to make people happy.

It's what you want for your kids, no? To be happy. To teach them how to find contentment, how to feel gratitude, how to seek the benefit of a forest walk or an evening exhale. How to do productive work, how to help others when you can and sometimes even if you dont especially want to. How to listen, how to calm the inner turmoil. 

I thought about the hike Ed I took in Blue Mounds State Park this weekend. It was Saturday and there weren't many others on the trails, but we did pass some small groups. One spoke a language I could not place, and another was a two person team. I'll guess that it was a father and daughter. She was close to my age, he was maybe in his mid eighties, maybe older. He walked with a cane and I thought he looked a little wobbly. It's a bumpy trail, with roots, rocks and many ascents and descents. Both Ed and I felt such admiration for him and we wanted to ask about his age, about his reason for being here that afternoon, but we were shy and thought perhaps we might insult him by appearing to question his ability to navigate the trails. Still, I doubt I'll ever forget him: his age did not stand in the way of that forest walk and I'm sure that the forest incorporated all its magic to help him move through in peace. 

Breakfast.

And the chocolate cake, baked. 

Now I have to pick up Snowdrop at Theater Camp. A new one! But not the last of the new ones!

At the farmette, she's in her tree again...

But we can't be idle today! I have another cake to bake -- a breakfast loaf with sour cherries. You know, I have all these sour cherries... Snowdrop, how about a fun book to read?

... while I bake my second cake.

And now we head for the Union Terrace. If you've been to Madison, chances are you've been to the Terrace. Technically, it's for those who work or study at the university, or, like me, are lifetime Union members, but anyone can get a day pass and in truth, most people aren't asked to show their cards. The iconic chairs spill out from the terrace onto the lake and it is one beautiful place to hang out with friends, especially on a summer eve. How many chairs? About two thousand! Here's one glance at a piece of it tonight:

Some of my daughter's friends brought their kids and one thing that's pretty cool about the place is that by the time kids are school-aged, you can trust them to have the run of the place, so that they go off and do their thing, while you visit with your friends.

(Sandpiper is too young to take advantage of such freedom!)

There is also an ice cream stand, selling our delicious University Babcock ice cream. Wisconsin is the dairy state. You know that, right?

(Sunset hugs...)

And now we are all back at the farmette. Snowdrop goes off to help Ed put away the chickens and feed the cats.

It's very, very late by the time we have the birthday cake...

Happy Birthday, sweet and precious child of mine! From all of us, to you.

With so much love...

food, flowers and the last day of July

In your typical southern Wisconsin summer, the lilies in our flower fields slow down precipitously by the end of the month. Yes, there will be August bloomers. Yes there will even be September bloomers. But the vast bulk will be done for the season. August is for phloxes andSeptember is for asters. And honestly, much of the color will continue, but in the tubs, where annuals never stop until the night of the first frost.

But we no longer have typical summers. We haven't had the mosquitoes, we had a late spring and a dry summer. And it looks to me like the lilies have a good week still ahead of them. I never count snipped lilies beyond July, but as this is still July, I did my final counting today: 605 snipped flower heads. That's more than yesterday!

My morning work and meditative indulgence in the fields:

It's another beautiful day here. Perfect weather of gentle breezes, partly sunny skies. I mean, I would like some rain. My flowers would like some rain. But if you're just trying to judge what's out there on this day -- well, it's splendid. 

Breakfast, of course, on the porch. 

And even before I finished my leftover half croissant half pain au chocolat, I set to work on the sour cherries. 

What's the game plan? Well, my friend who had lived in Denmark for a bunch of years emailed me this note (in response to yesterday's post):

In Denmark we pitted a whole bunch of cherries, laid them out on a baking sheet, put a piece of glass over the baking sheet and set them out in the sun until we had dried cherries to put on our oats for weeks.

What a splendid idea! I dont really have a clean piece of glass, but the Internet tells me I can use cheese cloth. And so I start in on pitting the cherries.

(about half done...)

And I am reminded again of preparing food at the restaurant. I rarely had to do the real grunt work there. I worked from 5 (after I'd be done teaching at the Law School) until closing (around 11 or even later on the weekend) and since service began at 6:30, someone else had to prepare most of my ingredients. I would just cook and plate from a nearly ready mise en place. That means I would never have to pit cherries. 

But someone else did. Carefully, because if a diner would crack a tooth on a missed pit, you'd hear about it.

It is, in fact, a boring job. And I'd say the same holds true for much of ingredient preparation. Sure, if you're cooking for your family, pulling off thyme leaves and chopping them into fine bits is not big deal. But for an evening service? It's tediously dull. Typically, the dullest tasks were passed on to the dish washing crew. Peeling potatoes, chopping onions -- that kind of thing. Probably they were the guys who also pitted the cherries. I was thinking this morning as I sat there with that heaping full bucket, that no one ever thanks those who pit the cherries in a local foodie restaurant where everything is fresh and honest. Maybe you will next time you get served some exquisite dish with cherries swimming in their own juices. Thank you for doing this so that I can enjoy the chef's creative ideas!

I put out a tray of the cherries for drying.

What are the chances that the cheepers wont notice the fruits on the picnic table? Hmm... Out comes the cheesecloth, secured with heavy objects.

In the afternoon, I drop by the young family's home. They're back from a Michigan beach vacation and I spend a few minutes catching up with them.

Our schedule isn't yet regular and I'm not sure it will ever return to a set pattern for the rest of the summer, so I'm not cooking Sunday dinners just yet. With a free late afternoon, I drag Ed out for another walk. Nothing ambitious, but it did feel so good to be out in the forest yesterday that I was itching for doing it again.

In the evening I was going to roast the chicken Ed and I bought from One Seed farmers up the road, but it is still frozen as can be so instead we order pizza. Of course, there is also corn.

And the evening is beautiful and I understood why so many poets have, over the centuries felt compelled to write about times like this: fading light, sweet smells of meadow flowers, cherries drying on a tray. Summer magic.

With love.