the arrival

People had such troubles with flights and airports this year! But we are so very lucky. One flight (to Detroit) comes in early. The next (to Paris)? On time. The connection? Straightforward. No lines for passport control, no lines for security check.The arrival (in Milan) -- no problem.

(Landing in Milan is always stunning on a clear day. You start your descent into the Alps...)

We are in Italy, though not really in Milan. From the airport we take a ride over to Pettenasco, a village at the shores of Lake Orta.

(At the foot of these mountains, as seen from the car...)

Let's pause a little on this: why travel great distances to settle in for a whole week on the shores of Lake Orta?

I love Italy's northern lakes: they have a magical combination of shimmering waters, and cascading hills, and distant mountains. The climate tends to be mild. The views -- exhilarating. I've stayed on the shores of the three big ones (Maggiore, Como and Garda), but Lake Orta is new to me. It's smaller, less well known, and yet still very close to Milan, so travel here isn't difficult. This is especially important at times of Covid. 

Fact is, I really wanted Snowdrop to experience that moment of waking up to a mountain view. Who are we kidding -- I wanted to wake up to an Italian mountain view. The one tiny issue I somehow forgot about is the weather -- you cannot be guaranteed a perfect moment in the mountains if you only come for a handful of days. My stays by Lake Garda have had rain. They've had unexpected snows. They had gray skies and drizzle day after day. Why did I not worry about this with a trip to Orta?

You could say that I just don't worry about such things. We'll deal with weather when we get to wherever we are going! (And, judging by the forecast, we will have stuff to deal with here!)

So, here we are in Pettenasco -- not a place you'd exactly think of when planning a distant getaway. But just a few minutes up the road from us is Orta San Giulio, and that place you might well think is worth a special trip.

We'll get to Orta San Giulio tomorrow (the one and only good weather day of the week, according to the weather people). Today, we arrive in our home for these handful of days ("Laqua by the Lake") tired and hungry. But so happy to be here! 

View:

A few words about our small hotel. It's rather new -- it's the simpler place where Antonino Cannavacciuolo cooks (he has a fancy restaurant in Orta San Giulio). Maybe you never heard of him. I never heard of him! But, ask any Italian and they'll nod their head -- he's their TV chef. Every country has one (and some countries have more than one!), no? The person who judges cooking competitions, dishing out praise and criticism without reservation. And well he might. He has earned his rosettes. Written his cookbooks. Prepared countless fabulous dishes.

(I will admit to one other piece of ignorance: when I booked the room here, I had no idea that it came with a kitchen of note. I really booked it for the view and the lake access. Snowdrop is not exactly appreciative of complicated dishes. Sauces, to her, are something she'd rather remove from her plate. We will eat here, at the Bistrot maybe once or twice, but I am sure she will be happier when I take her to the local pizzeria.)

What do we have energy for on this first day here? 

Well, she saw the pool. She was in her swimsuit before I even began unpacking.

And it was a great way for her to let loose after all these hours of travel. The depth was just a touch above her chin which forced her to practice swimming. 

Great strides were made today despite the tiredness...

(an infinity pool suspended over Lake Orta)

In fact, it was hard to get her out of there! But I did. In time for a shower and dinner, at a pizza place picked by our hotel staff -- Vecchio Forno dallo Zio Aldo. A five minute walk up the road.

And as nearly always in Italy, the pizza is great. What can I say -- Italians know how to fire up a pie.

(She sketched a whole book in between the ordering and the eating.)

We walk back to our place by the lake just after sunset. I'll let the lake and the mountains speak for themselves.

With love...

the departure

We are leaving today, my young traveling companion and I. But where to? And for how long??

A week. Away. Far away where the waters sparkle (I hope) and the breezes delight and an echo travels to your door. What, you want more details? Come back tomorrow.

Because this morning -- well, it's still a farmette morning. With the last of my summer chums showing off for me.

And the Bresse girls parading, having won us over with their grace, safe now from the hatchet that was once to be their fate.

And Ed, oh that Ed! So loyally there for our breakfast on the porch! How I love that guy!

I cannot call it a leisurely morning. Things, scattered in piles all over the farmhouse! The little girl's suitcase is half empty, but mine is going to bulge. I need to be prepared! For rains, for sniffles, for one thousand mishaps! 

But finally, I am ready and I drive to the airport and meet my traveling buddy there...

And we are off! To Detroit first. 

(At Detroit's Airport: the tunnel of lights -- a family favorite!)

And two more flights after that. Wish us good winds and good luck!

With so much love...

day before

I'm taking off tomorrow. Just a quick getaway, though I wont really be getting away from my world of beloveds, since Snowdrop will be traveling with me.

This means that today I should focus on getting myself ready, but that's hard to do because the weather is once again stunning. Glorious sunshine, gentle breezes -- that perfect combination that hit us so often this summer. With the exception of this past weekend. Ah well...

I do minimum work in the flower fields.

So small is my lily load that I don't even carry a bucket for the spent flowers. I snip and I toss them somewhere into the bushes. And I admire the last grand ladies that are still popping colors into our gardens.

Ed is blasting out stumps, but I'm in my late August bubble of yard work laziness. It's been a hell of a growing season. I was on top of it through most of the moths, but now it's time to sit back a little. Watch the bees work the lavender, walk through the meadows, enjoy the deliciousness of what's out there. 

(Including the peaches. Ed picks a bowlful for every breakfast. Some are great, some are just okay, all are eaten.)

In the afternoon I hop over to my daughter's house to help Snowdrop pack for her little trip. We're flying and I absolutely insist on nothing beyond what we can carry with us. I've read enough about lost luggage this summer. I want none of that hassle. And here's the beauty of summer travel: after we're done packing her wee carryon is only half full! 

That's cause for celebration! A trip to the farmhouse for some playtime and treats.

And eventually I'm back with Ed and I make a supper, call it a last supper -- a Bittman special of grilled shrimp sprinkled with feta, lemon juice, olive oil and oregano and importantly, because we have so so many of them -- with baby tomatoes. Corn on the side. of course.

Summer foods. Typical farmette foods. Oh, how I love this time of the year!

with love...

Sunday

Visitors from overseas don't get much better than this. Enthusiastic, positive, adventurous, accommodating. Happy. Honestly, looking back on the weekend, I have nothing but warm thoughts throughout. My Polish guests made this into a beautiful set of days.

They're leaving this morning -- onto their more rural set of adventures. (Their first days in the US were spent in cities: first New York, then Chicago. And as architects, I can tell you that they were significantly more impressed with Chicago. At least if you pair up Manhattan and Chicago, there's no question but that on a livability scale, to say nothing of architectural integrity, the Windy City comes out ahead.) And so we have our last meal together. (And here, they sweetly tell me that all their best meals and most definitely the corn that they ate at the farmhouse were best here, in Madison. Yay Madison!)

But first, I clean the farmette flower fields. As usual.

(ahhhh... the last of the lily queens)

(Bold Beatrice... Or, one of the other three Bresse hens. Who can tell...)

It seems fitting to take them all to Sardine for brunch. That Madison restaurant has been our family favorite for years and years and it has so much going for it! The location, in an old brewery building by the lake...

... is lovely. (I asked for a window table and they sweetly obliged.) The food is well thought out, with something for every palate, all fresh and honest. 

As we eat and talk about the future (because in the last minutes of a visit, you always let go of the past and turn toward the future), I think how decisions you make always have unexpected consequences and more often than not, mine have been hugely fortuitous. If I hadn't gambled on that old apartment in Warsaw, I would have never met these people. And here I am now, with friends for life. And with a window toward a new generation of Poles (they are way younger than my other Polish friends). 

(French fry dipped in maple syrup? Mmm, good!)

And so they depart. Only a wicker basket from Poland with a bunch of books for the kids remains.

Happy travels to this wonderful foursome!

And now I turn back to farmette life. 

For a very short while (I'm leaving soon). But definitely for this Sunday: there is a walk with Ed in our local park prairie...

And there is dinner, here, with the young family.

A calm moment before things get hectic again. In a good way. Oh, the beauty of a very full summer!

With love...

Saturday

It could have ben a sunny day -- like those that were generously given to us all summer long. It wasn't that. On the other hand, it could have stormed and rained all day and we would have had a messy time of it, given our mostly outdoor plans. It wasn't that either. So on balance -- I'm so relieved. We mostly won out.

This is the second day of Karolina and Pawel's visit to Madison. (Their two younger ones are here as well.) And honestly, I want to pack in all of Madison's gems into this day, because yesterday was just a small intro and tomorrow they will be leaving. So it's this or rust!

I get up early. Flower fields to clean, chickens to feed, cats to comfort.

Breakfast, by myself. For once I do not want to wake Ed.

And then I am off to meet up with my lovely visitors from Poland. 

If you're a Madisonian, what part of the city would you show off to people who have traveled so far to be here? On a cloudy day with the threat of rain? Where the two adults are architects?

We start off with the farmers market on the Square. But really abbreviated, with a lot of cut throughs, because it's one thing to come up here from Chicago and another to come in from Poland. You want something more than just stalls of food (even though stalls of food say a lot about a community's foibles and predilections). We do touch on one of the stalls that scream Wisconsin at you: Farmer John's, for the cheese curds. Which everyone liked.

And I found it hard to pass on the flowers -- they are so beautiful at the August markets! But, if all goes well, I'm leaving next week and flowers seem like such an extravagance for just three days of table time! 

This is when the threat of rain is the greatest, so we turn toward the Capitol. It's such a beautiful public space. The dome is magnificent, inside and out.

Of course, we walk up to the upper most balcony. Views are to all corners of the world. This one is to the south, where in the distance you can see the rooftop fountain of Wright's Monona Terrace.

And from the Capitol, we walk over to the spot where a very hidden Frank Lloyd Wright house stands (the so called Lamp House). And then still further down, toward Lake Mendota, where we have to share a path with geese and all that they leave behind. So much walking! No one protests. If I may generalize, Poles are terrific walkers

Still, it's time to find something for the youngest member of our group and so she and her dad detour to the Children's Museum while the remaining three of us grab a coffee/tea at Starbucks. And from there -- we all hike over to the terrace on the Monona Terrace.

Inside, there is a motorcycle convention, which makes for a very bizarre juxtaposition of indoor convention space (as planned out by FLWright and then, finished off by the Taliesin architect Puttnam) and shiny monster motorcycles. I should be grateful -- they let us meander around anyway, even though it is their space for the day, but really, the inside of Monona Terrace doesn't thrill me a whole lot in the best of times, so we keep that visit short.

And now it's time for lunch.

We eat at Merchant, which has a special place in my heart, as both daughters had their post-wedding breakfast bash here and it was wonderful. These days, Merchant has spacious outdoor seating, the kind you can only dream about when you're bumping next to your neighbor in, say, Paris. We have a lovely and very leisurely meal.

With the colors of Majorelle right at our table! (Both Karolina and I love that deep blue! We also love our mimosas!)

(The others study their cheeseburgers carefully. Are we all-American or what??)

In talking to them and their kids, I get a sense of how an artistic predisposition develops. Both Karolina nd her husband are obviously artistically inclined. So are the kids, though of course, whether they act on this in any way as they get older remains to be seen. But so often you can see that trail of breadcrumbs that starts with parental talent and leads right to a serious involvement with the arts on the part of the kid. Oh, sure -- there are many artists who were never nurtured with their craft, but many were, and extensively so. In fact, Karolina told me that little Frank (as in Lloyd Wright) had a mother who so believed in his future genius that even in his crib she hung pictures of splendid buildings for him to admire and, in some way soak up into his artistic consciousness.

The market is winding down by now, but we pass by one vendor who has not yet packed up and Karolina and her daughter put together a bouquet for me to take home. 

And I do head home now, so as to give them some space to explore more of FL Wright's houses (scatted throughout Madison) on their own. 

But they come back for dinner at the farmhouse. 

(First, a stop at the picnic table for a fraises de bois hunt...)

Then more porch time. It's not exactly a home made dinner tonight. Instead,  I let them make up their own (takeout) pizzas for a casual pizza supper.

Again we linger. Over chocolate chip cookies and watermelon. And Jeni's Splendid ice cream. The little girl dozes off and still we linger. And it is sweetly nostalgic, because it is our last evening together. I'm sure that our next encounter will be some day, some year, back in Warsaw.

Distance friendships. So tough at times, but so very special when it all comes together and someone makes that effort to travel such a distance to see you.  They made that effort and I love them for it!

Friday

So who is coming to Madison? Who deserves so much attention and has us taking apart drains and dusting off corners that have remained, well, dusty for a while? Long time Ocean readers may recall her -- she is my Polish architect whom I hired to gut and remodel my Warsaw apartment. (I no longer own this apartment. In my life, things change rapidly and head in interesting directions.) Over the course of our work together on that project, she became a very good friend. And this year, she, along with her architect husband and two awesome kids decided to come visit the US (not her first time, though certainly her first trip to the Midwest!) and to drive up to see me in Madison.

These guys are powerhouse architects. They do big stuff back home. And what strikes me as remarkable is that they truly live and breathe their craft. The efforts that they went to in order to inspect architectural gems in and around Chicago were... impressive! So my thinking is that I need to wow them with our own Madisonian gems, which is, on the one hand, not that hard because both of them have a deep interest in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright wasn't born in Madison, but he spent his childhood very near us and indeed, his young adulthood was right here, in the place we call home. (On the other hand, the weather is not cooperating this weekend! Man oh man, couldn't we do the storms another time??)

Wright moved a little here and there but eventually he returned to his childhood haunts and Madison is the richer for it. Not only do we have a sprinkling of his Usonian and prairie style homes here, but of course, we have Monona Terrace and the Unitarian Meeting House. All his designs. But today isn't the day for this. Before the rain sets in, I have things that I must accomplish and that we, all five of us must accomplish.

For me, there's garden cleaning.

And a trip to the bakery, and breakfast with Ed.

And then I finally get to greet the traveling foursome as they drive up to Madison.

We take a stroll down State Street, heading toward the university campus and the Union Terrace.

Is there a better way to introduce the city and its unique youthful vibe?

We come back to the farmhouse for dinner (after a walk across farmette lands)

I made a simple shrimp version of a salad nicoise. With lots of spritz's and many desserts (including a Madison Sourdough cherry-blueberry-peach pie).

(Though I have to think it's the corn that will steal the show. I mean, day old, from Stoneman's -- you can't improve on that.)

Only the son is comfortable with the English language, so Ed stays to the sidelines, which is a shame because these people are full of info and ideas about construction and design. (When I first started hanging out with Ed I once saw him fill out a form where you had to state your profession. Without hesitation he put down "design" which surprised me then, but which I fully understand now as I've watched him work over the years.)

Still, it is a lovely evening and especially because I haven't seen these people since before the pandemic. Too, they are terrific travelers, beautiful guests and great story tellers.  

Tomorrow, we hit Madisonian gems. In the rain. What are you going to do...

With love...