exploring

Things are looking so September good out there! 

The paths add balance to the farmette lands and today, I took the hand mower out and cleaned up the narrow alleys linking one segment with the next. The tractor mower doesn't fit in the alleys. 

The asters are starting to throw down their purple color, the phlox will give an occasional bloom from now until frost, even the lily will show that she's not fully dormant yet. And it all smells so autumnal! So rich! So heavenly.

Breakfast. 

Ed is pushing for a walk in the Hook Lake wildlife area. We've rarely explored it, possibly because access to it is limited. Indeed, it's been closed off lately -- overgrown and unwelcoming. Still, he thinks there is a path...

We ride out on his motorbike and we look every which way...

Nothing. No path to the lake. Lots of private property signs, despite the fact that there is a chunk of land we know is under the stewardship of the DNR. 

Indeed, a couple comes out of their house in the woods and questions our presence there. Should I sing them the refrain from Woodie Guthrie's song? I'm always dismayed how much rural folk guard their property against walkers. I suppose I get it: you protect what's "yours," keeping the right to chase someone off with a gun, because that walker may harm you with his own gun. Fine, but this mindset  does not make for a happy and welcoming landscape. I think about the right to roam laws elsewhere and I have to say I'm envious. Our roaming is limited to designated public spaces. 

In the end, we do find a swath of DNR wildlife land and we explore it to the max: corner to corner.

And I like it! The tall grasses, the giant oaks -- it's likely the way it was hundreds of years back.

I tell Ed it's a fantastic little walk, but I know he's hungry to probe deeper. Ed doesn't travel far, but his great desire to explore his immediate surroundings is profound. In the years we've lived here, we've gotten to know every bit of public land, every corner and crevice of it. Today, we add this small fragment to our list of explored local lands. It was the perfect day to take in its September beauty.

In the afternoon, Snowdrop is here once again. Though Friday isn't her typical farmhouse day, we are making up for lost time!

(I show her my crazy beanstalk!)

(we pick a few peaches...)

(she loves our watermelon patch!)

(... and the meadows...)

Oh and look who is here to pick up his sister?!

In the evening, I cook up some soup and life feels pretty close to normal once again.

With love...

pleasant tasks

Because I have clear ideas on how to mow paths over the farmette lands, I am the one these days using the tractor mower. About once a month. A job I dislike, but someone has to do it. Ed has a lot of wood cutting and shredding to do (the big willow is slowly shedding limbs) and so it's fair that I should take on some of these more tedious jobs now that my growing season is winding down.

So, a morning walk...

And a visit with the beautiful Bresse girls...

And a baking stint in the kitchen (blueberry muffins), followed by breakfast...

And then I'm on the mower.

A bumpy job. Sort of like a very cheap and dirty county fair ride. Yuk. I've neglected stuff and there'd been rain so it takes longer than I would have liked. By the time I finish, I am ready for... a nap. (I blame the medicines I'm still taking: zonk out stuff!)

But not for long. It's a pick up Snowdrop day and, too, it's a pick up CSA veggie box day and finally, it's our local farmers market day. I combine all three. My willing assistant keeps me company.

And I'm thinking that what they say is true: stick in a component of pleasure onto your todo list and the todo list grows longer, but it becomes significantly easier to work through. Snowdrop is my component of pleasure!

Still, the rumble and sway of the mower is with me even now as I write this. Nothing can make that job delightful. Nothing.

Except maybe the idea that I wont have to do it for another month.

with love...

hi world, I'm back!

That's the way it felt when I stepped out this morning, quite capable of feeding the animals and taking my morning walk. 

Such an inconsequential routine, yet for a whole week, I could not do it. Could not bend down to pull a weed. Could not throw chicken food down for the hens and their mate. Could not make a cup of tea, could not sit up for more than a handful of minutes. 

Wiped out. 

That switch from fully active, engaged and on board to incapable of doing anything at all was flicked so suddenly and so completely that I am still reeling from it all. But, not reeling so much that I want to spend the next weeks analyzing every last detail of what went wrong. Because in fact, a lot went right!

I was able to get home. I have the privilege of great medical care just eight minutes up the road from me. Even Ed was impressed with the size and comfort of my hospital room. I was impressed with the super staff of docs and nurses and technicians. You know how they say you should never go to the ER room around 5 am, because you're hitting the tail end of a tired night shift? Well, twice I went in exactly then and everyone was superb. I commented on this to them and they laughed -- that's when we're on our second caffeine hit! It's a great time to come in!

And of course, the downward spiral eventually turned around and now I am so much better. So much better!

(our meadow in the new peach orchard, to the east...)

(our meadow in the young orchard, to the west...)

I haven't eaten breakfast with Ed since... the weekend. The previous weekend.

And I am back on schedule to pick up Snowdrop at school. And she is happy.

September... It can be full of grand surprises. Like, a little girl who decides on her own to pin her hair back...

Like a bunch of lilies suddenly sprouting from a clump of autumnal buds...

So, let's stick with the grand surprises for the rest of the month, okay?

With so much love...

like a delayed flight

Leaving the hospital is like departing on a flight with engine trouble. There are going to be delays. No one seems in a hurry to see you go. People go about their business, someone comes by to do another test, you think -- ah, the definitive last check, but then someone else comes by and says one more is needed. Food trays come in, food trays go out. You think about ordering groceries for home, about taking a shower, but maybe that's the wrong move. Maybe you should wait, much like you would wait at the gate, because maybe they will have called your flight just as you stepped in the shower stall. And then you will have missed your chance to leave.

And the sunshine outside is brilliant and I can just imagine the breeze passing through farmhouse spaces right now and say, doesn't anyone want to get me out of here today? 

I think about how chaotic these days have been. No one's plans have been completely upended, but my sickness has changed things for sure. For the Polish travelers, for my family, for Ed. For me. I haven't been admitted to a hospital since my brain hemorrhage thirty years ago. I'm your average healthy Joe, (though the staff here keeps telling me that I'm the most with-it 69 year old on the floor. Well now, that can have many interpretations. Sick but with it. Is it better to be that, or well but out of it, of declining sharpness? Fuzzy on the brain but spry as a pony?)

It takes a while to bounce back from something that was so intense, but I tend not to look back so I'm sure I'll be scheming again soon enough.

*.    *     *

Once again, I am home. Warm, mellow evening light, birds butterflies bees, Ed. 

How easy it is to assume it will always be thus. A farmhouse, always waiting for you to come home to it. Ed, inside, ready to launch the next project. But how easy, too, it is to grow weak, even after a year of such energy that there wasn't much I couldn't do before that game changing Wednesday in New York. Right now, a walk in the farmette fields is about as much as I can handle in an afternoon. Afterwards -- I'm ready for a long nap!   

*.    *     *

This is the time to add a special thank you to all my good friends who have reached out to us these past few days. The sweet words! Suzanne, that soup and the wild rice salad!! 

All of you are awesome people who know how to put a smile into people's lives. 

I'll leave you with a quote that came to me from from Jean in Australia -- “there’s no such thing as a healthy person. Only an under investigated one.” A thousand tests and a million speculative diagnoses later, I surely have to agree!

With so much love...

hospital humor

So what's so funny about being stuck in the hospital for several days? 

Well, take an Ed visit: he comes, brings me a requested bottle of shampoo, a comb, he notes my half finished bagel on a tray by the door and asks -- this yours? I think so. In a minute, it's gone

The doc comes in as he licks up the last of the cream cheese. Ed tells him -- you look just like your picture! (For some reason there is a booklet of staff doctors with large photos lying o the couch, almost begging you to look and admire.) Thankfully, the doc takes that as a complement.

By this time I am in fine spirits. I'm past the berry smoothie morning, where I was woken at 6 to start drinking several bottles of stuff meant for the compost pile so far as I am concerned but which had the appealing name of berry smoothie, to stir your imagination in a good direction. (This is to scan your digestive tract.) I will never again look at berry smoothies with any amount of enthusiasm.

It is unclear if I will be a hospital patient for a day, for two days. I doubt that it will be longer than that. There is, however, a funny (broadly defining the word funny) consequence of having a whole slew of tests done for something as straightforward as a fever. At my age, if you look hard enough, you will find a carpet bag of goodies to excite you. Sinewy weird things growing, air pockets forming, nodes enlarging, passageways shrinking.  It's like going on a truffle hunt after a rainstorm. There are going to be mushrooms out there, not just the coveted truffles. Lots and lots of mushrooms of various shapes and sizes. 

Nonetheless, you teach yourself not to be such a fussbudget. Take the good enough, ignore the bad. Dont sweat the truffles, stick with the porcini, turn away from the poison caps.  

In the meantime,  I am happy as can be to send Ed downstairs to get me a guaranteed cure for my headache: a cafe latte from the coffee shop downstairs.

(I haven't had coffee since New York. Caffeine withdrawal is a terrible thing.)

How does the day end?  Fever is gone, even as a new antibiotic allergy has been discovered within me. I look right now like a poison mushroom with inverted colors: red dots on pale skin. My insides are mostly feeling fine with some question marks still floating around. Sort of like your average 69 year old's report!

And here's one final sweet and therefore funny take on life: you tell Ed that the world will end tomorrow and he'll always say -- it sure will! But you ask him -- what do you think, was it the mussels or is it that other diagnosis that you don't really want for yourself? -- and he'll say: dont be ridiculous. Of course it was the mussels.

wait, how did I end up here?

Another night of fever. Sigh. One more trudge to the local hospital and this time they do not let me go home. You're in for at least for 48 hours, until we figure out what's going on.. I see that Mystery Disease is  looking to control my life right now.

So, I subject myself to the various tests and spinal taps, and tons of blood cultures to make sure it's not this, it's not that, and it's mostly fine except the word "bacterial" seems to be creeping into the conversation.

I would be pretty mad if I picked up some bacterial infection. I'm the one who obsesses about clean stuff. Did you know that I actually rinse off shoe bottoms before I put them in a suitcase, after walking in them in some dirty city? (New York is one dirty city!) Ed only laughs at my distaste for dirt. So I'm the one hospitalized with some probable bacterial infection?

Well, so be it. Eventually I'm moved to a hospital room and it is spacious and comfortable and even has a small couch. And pretty soon Ed is here with my computer and bare essentials. Being an excellent hostess that I am, I fall asleep during his visit.

He leaves, I'm left to the quiet of a room where nothing much happens as we all wait trying to figure out what's next.

Meantime it's raining and cold outside and now is the time to get some more sleep. I've become good at sleeping at every opportunity. Just watch me!

With love...

Saturday

If you are sporting a fever for three days straight, they're going to tell you to get yourself over to the clinic for a checkup. Well, I didn't and so on day four of the fever I was feeling so awful that I reluctantly drove myself over to the hospital for that needed exam. 

Not Covid! Yay!

So what's wrong with me? I am so far a medical mystery! Bacterial, viral, who knows. These kinds of illnesses rarely get a diagnosis. What you need is symptom control. And from the wonderful team at my small local hospital I got some great symptom control!

Still not totally done with Mystery Disease, but I'm inching closer to the finish line!

And speaking of sports, how about that Polish tennis superstar! Ed and I "purchased" a free trial of sports tv so that I could watch Iga Swiatek win today. Ed asks -- you think she's better than you? I say -- um, yeah. But probably cause she's one third my age and uses better equipment than we do!

As I listened to this modest young woman accept her trophy, I had to smile. She noted the challenge that she faced. To paraphrase -- I mean, it's New York, everything is so big and crazy here! Iga is 21 -- the age my friends were when they first came to this big and crazy city. Of course, they did not return home with $2.6 million dollars in their pocket. But, there are many prizes that you can take back with you. And maybe 50 years from now Iga will come back to New York and revisit the place of her big win. Poles tend to be sentimental.

As for life back at the farmette -- do I have any credible photos to post yet? How about a butterfly flying in the thick of September blooms? Just because.

With love...

home again

I continue to test negative for Covid, but, I also continue to be sick. Fever, exhaustion, weird relationship to food (yuk!). That kind of thing. But, hey! All crappy things eventually pass and I have plenty of hours to sleep. Ed and I avoid each other, just in case, though I am by now convinced that the mussels caused my woes. No one else is sick and I took precautions. I'm going to place my bets on the mussels.

As I slept (basically all the hours since I got home were spent in a reclining position with eyes closed), I couldn't believe how quiet it is here, at the farmette. It really is true: New York is nasty in terms of noise levels. My hotel room looked out on 6th avenue and there must have been some pot hole or rough surface on the road because every few minutes, a loud rattle would come from a truck passing over the imperfection. It wasn't an awful noise, but it was constant. Here, the only sound is the occasional cat complaining that I'm not petting her enough.

And here's something else: I am happy to say that I am no longer surrounded by what you might call the beautiful people. Because fashion week starts today, models (I'm guessing they were models -- they were stick thin and they wore clothes without wrinkles. Not a single wrinkle!) were checking into the hotel and as I sat waiting for my cab for La Guardia, I had a chance to give them all a good stare.

When did we decide that we will judge people based on their physical attributes? And that these should include creaseless clothes, silky hair and stick thin figures? What a weird way to judge ourselves! No, I have no problem with trying to appear attractive, but I do object to this constant fixation, especially when it comes to women, with age, with skinny forms, and with perfect grooming. 

This morning I slept. And slept. And slept. Still no appetite, but feeling okay enough to pick up the girl at school. She so begged for it and I cannot say no. Just for an hour or two. I tell Ed that I am like Queen Elizabeth in that I cannot call in with a sick day. Still, I mask up solidly and we spent time outside, and inside with open windows. She is low maintenance and in the end, I turn on the TV for her. 

And the day ends with Ed fixing chicken noodle soup for me. Unfortunately, what we have is the awful organic nonsense. It's no Campbells, that's for sure. Or, maybe it's that my tastebuds escaped and were replaced by some phantom ones that decided to hate all foods?  

Waiting for PCR results, but still feeling confident that all this will pass soon enough.

With love...

Reunion Four, well, maybe not

And immediately after I posted my Ocean account yesterday, I felt really ill. Burning hot.

Wait, how could that be? I am just about the only person in New York still wearing a mask indoors or when in a crowd. The Ferry, Times Square -- I'm masked. Meals? I sit by the window, with good air flow. Airplane? Airport? Taxi? Elevator? Masked, with my super duper KN95, from reliably reviewed companies! Moreover, my friends feel great! So how is it that I am feverish and feeling like a truck rolled over me, back and forth, several times?

Of course, you think Covid. But honestly, I'm thinking that it's equally likely, indeed more likely that the mussels yesterday at lunch time were not fresh.

Still, I'm not going to risk it. Even with an early in the game negative Covid test, I don't want to feel terrible about passing on anything to these people who still have a chunk of traveling to do. So I do what I must do: I switch my return flight to today and I leave them to their last day in New York alone. Well traveled that they are, they can certainly manage a museum and Central Park and cousins without me. Let's not give ourselves too much credit for helping them on this trip. I mean, it's not like they're freshly 21!

I sleep a long time. Like ten hours. And I pack and I double mask, just in case, and take a last walk in New York, alone.

When I am in a place that's not home, I look at the people around me, trying to fit them into their place. But in this city, can you really tell what defines a New Yorker? Maybe you can. I snap this picture of five people crossing at 59th and sixth. The only ones not looking at a phone are the bicyclists. This isn't the New York I knew of course. We didn't have phones back then. Still, everyone walked briskly. Seemingly everyone.

What's with the skinny tall towers here? Ed and I watched a documentary on how these are built. Crazy enough to suspend yourself that high to add another floor to real estate. But who exactly wants to live there? You couldn't pay me!

The park is so large, the girl is so small... I've never loved Central Park. Maybe it reminds me of gym class: we would walk over sometimes and play field hokey. I was a pretty sporty kid, but I did not like field hokey.

Your classic CP photo...

And here's a shock! I come across an ice cream cart with these:

Good Humor eclairs, Good Humor strawberry shortcake. I liked them both when I was maybe 11 or 12. The same guy came out almost everyday and positioned himself in front of Korvettes, a couple of blocks from my home. Tony. His name was Tony. I wanted to believe that he liked me. He didn't speak great English and he was older and I have to think I was a pretty lonely kid to go out and seek him out so often. The last time I went I knew we would be leaving, return to Poland. I told him this piece of news. H smiled, nodded and continued selling.

At noon I test myself. Negative. I am leave my lovely hotel (my credit card thanks me for this early departure), and get a cab to La Guardia. And I'm thinking, if I do turn Covid positive, I want that to happen at the farmette, not in New York during fashion week where prices are mind boggling.

(One last look: United Nations on the march, with flags unfurled...)

I have a change of planes in Detroit. I am cold. Fever's back. Still, I am negative, I have a mask. I buy a blanket and cover myself with it, spread out on the floor like someone who's been traveling from another continent and back. The sun comes through, I am warm again. 

Three hours later I board the flight to Madison. There isn't a person who needed to be home more than me right now.

Hi Ed....

Reunion Three

Good Morning from New York, where it is still threatening to rain, still a little cool, but who cares, it's the city and the pulse is dynamic, and leaping over puddles at street corners is an art you master early on if you live here.

I wake up thinking that you can actually enjoy New York if you moved away from it, so that you've forced a separation between it and you. It's no longer hellish to try to make it to appointments on time, because your appointments are not in this corked up place where "getting there" is definitely not part of the fun. So I'm relaxing my resistance to New York. I want to like it again, in the way that you like much in life when you are way older because you realize perfection is elusive and, as my granddaughter keeps telling me, everyone (and everything) has his or her genius.

Breakfast downstairs again. Am I the only one on the planet that loves eating breakfasts that have some formality to them? You will never catch me munching on a doughnut standing up in the kitchen and grabbing a coffee to go. I need to sit down and take in the world. To set the mood for the day. As they say in yoga-land, to set my intentions.

Today we are to recreate the key moment of our New York adventure of fifty years ago: call it The Ferry Ride. I'll come back to this in a bit. First, I walk over to the subway stop where we meet to ride over to the 9/11 Memorial.

(this sign stands just as you enter Times Square)

The twin towers of the World Trade Center were not completed until 1973 and so in 1972, when my Polish friends visited me in New York, we saw their silhouettes, but we did not visit them. Of course, they were destroyed in 2001. That span of time! So short, really. From 1973 until 2001. I wasn't in New York when they were taken down but of course, everyone of us on this side of the ocean lived and breathed that attack in a profound, life changing way. So we pause here. We must. We walk around both reflective pools. We touch the names unscripted on the stone. So many names...

And now we walk to the the ferry station. A photo was taken fifty years ago of this ferry crossing and of course, recreating that photo is an important element of this journey. There were five of us back in 1972, but only three are taking this ferry ride today. Still, we have someone take that photo, once of youthful zest, now of senior reflection. On the right, you'll see the photo taken then. One of my friends is holding it.

(Let's include the wives: after all, they traveled here for this as well...)

When I was here last time, I visited Ellis Island with Ed. That was moving and I suppose now, following the Trump years it would be really tough to walk through spaces that claimed to give immigrants are fair chance at entry. Back in the early decades of the twentieth century a great chunk of European immigrants traveled through Ellis Island several times. This was certainly true for my parents and grandparents (Like a Swallow describes their attempts to settle in America). Now of course, the place is a museum, nothing more, and we take care of the problems of immigrants by not agreeing on any solution at all. We just fight about it and the masses stay huddled, just not on Ellis Island. Will we someday put up a museum commemorating the next chapter of our country's immigration saga? Maybe at the southern border?

(In the words of Emma Lazarus -- Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free... Words chiseled onto a plaque afixed to the pedestal in 1903, after Lazarus had long died. What did they mean? Do we use them to inflate our image of American exceptionalism? Are we still reflecting on such ideals? Were they ever ideals? If you want to set yourself thinking about these issues, you might want to read the Atlantic article about the poem here. It, like all of history, is complicated!)

(brooding sky but at least there's no rain... do you see the Statue of Liberty?))

From the ferry we take that epic walk uptown. You start at the southern tip of Manhattan and you walk as far as your legs can carry you. Wall Street, Chinatown... 

(picking up some fruit on Canal Street)

Little Italy, of course. A perfect place to pause for a late lunch. It isn't outstanding food, but it's good enough...

Cannoli from a bakery that claims to be the "king of cannoli..."

SoHo, the Village, all of it.

We split up at Bleeker Street. I send them to Washington Square Park, while I walk a little further into the heart of the Village. I give them very detailed instruction on the subway connection back to their hotel. I hope they make it without issues.

Epic walk indeed. And we only cheated once and hopped on the subway for two stops in the financial district. I mean, all tall office buildings after a while look the same. We saved ourselves for the better stuff ahead.

So, given that we did the Ferry Ride, what else is left on our New York agenda? Well, there is one museum, but too, there are Polish relatives and friends. When someone comes from Poland all the way to New York, they look up people who were once close to them, even if substantial time has passed since that connection held strong. My friends went to grade school with a guy who moved to New Jersey. Too, there is a cousin and she has a husband and a daughter. Seeing these people, these essentially Polish people is on our schedule for tomorrow. But right now, I can only think about getting some rest. Delicious rest with maybe some of the cookies I picked up at the Italian bakery. Sounds good, doesn't it?