Chicago!

With kids, you do well if you know how to pivot when the moment calls for it. You make plans, but a child may have her own ideas. Or, she may suddenly need care and boom! Your plans must change. To find joy in a new path -- that's your challenge, and if you make an adjustment, and if you still keep that happy momentum going -- the day will turn out just fine. More than just fine, in fact. Beautiful.

This morning, I wake up to find Primrose a little under the weather. Enough so that we need to adjust. As she catches up to her energy levels, I focus in on her sister, whose energy levels are super charged!

 

Breakfast, with Juniper. And newspaper reading with dad.

Kids bounce. One minute they need to rest, another minute they're up and running.

Still, we shift plans. Parents are off with older girl for a doc visit and errands. Juniper and I play, which always involves music and dance.

And with a pretty clear bill of health, we jump back onto our initial goal -- of going to lunch at Time Out. You, the traveler of yore, may recognize Time Out as a big name in the travel guide business. Well now. They've branched out. Chicago (and Lisbon, I hear) has a food court that's under their sponsorship and it is excellent! I choose Ethiopian cuisine. Others spread themselves out between the continents. Asia, Africa, Texas. It's all there. 

(feeling better?)

Great foods push me to eat a big lunch, even when normally I resist. 

 

(happy post-lunch crew)

 

 

Filled with good food we make our way back to the car.

I'm dropped off at the neighborhood grocery store to pick up a thing or two, the rest proceed home for naps, other errands, and eventually we're all home and my daughter brings out the rolling pin (figuratively speaking) and sets to work making Madelines. 

It's raining outside. Milky coffee and Madelines on a rainy day? The best!

Dinner is also at home. My girl cooks for us all and she is one wonderful cook.

And so ends my second day here. With a massive degree of contentment. And love...

to Chicago

I swear, I'll settle down for the rest of the month. Indeed, I wont leave Wisconsin again until summer! Well, right about then. But today, I need to drive south. To Chicago. I haven't seen my five year old granddaughter since she turned six! Nor her sister, who is still a precocious two year old!

It's a rushed morning. I didn't have the wherewithal to get ready earlier in the week, and so I do it now. Nonetheless, there is always time to take in what is just outside the farmhouse door.

 

 

And the birdsong! I spotted and/or heard the following, in just a two minute period:  Downy Woodpecker, American Robin, Red-winged Blackbird, Song Sparrow, Blue Jay, American Crow, a Fox Sparrow (a first for me!), and a Dark-eyed Junco! And somewhere in the distance I heard the mating call of a Sandhill Crane. It's loud out there in spring!

I have breakfast with Ed...

And I head out, hoping to beat the traffic that pours into Chicago in increasing numbers as the day progresses.

It is so good to see the younger family again!

I wasn't here for Primrose's birthday, so we celebrate it today! Juniper helps.

The afternoon is all play and talk. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And very quickly the time rolls to evening.

We drive down to Chicago's Little Italy for dinner. You have to picture this: weaving our way at the periphery of the downtown, we have the last bits of sunlight to the west and the sharp outlines of Chicago's skyline to the east. A stunning city scape. Perhaps I should have used my camera more, but I was too busy listening to my grandgirls singing along to the music on the radio.

We eat at the Peanut Park Trattoria.

 

 

 

Purely Italian food. So good that everyone ate everything! 

 

 

We aren't the only "larger family" there. Aunts, grandparents, children, parents. Large tables for large families. Together. Loving the moment. 

At home again, the kids go to sleep, I stay up and review all that has accumulated over the months -- thoughts, ideas, questions -- it's the perfect evening for it. My kids are wise and getting input from them always helps me plan for the future. 

And yes, I'm ready to crash soon after the youngest kids doze off, but before the older kids, my girl and her husband give it up for the day. Funny how at a certain age your bedtime gets awfully close to that of a kindergartner! 

How good it is to be with these guys for these few April days! With so much love...

 

Friday

It struck me that I have not woken up to a sunny day in many, many weeks. Spain had its warm days, but the sun was not with us. And since my return, we have had the tougher side of April show her face. It's a tricky month here, in Wisconsin: sometimes you love it, sometimes you want to kick and scream at its return to winter weather. By my birthday (right there around Earth Day), things typically settle down to a nice comfortable range of temperatures, but early on, it can get dicey.

So when I wake up to brilliant sunshine today, I breathe a sigh of relief. Finally, we may be on our way to splendid weather!

 

 

 

Morning walk to barn. And back again. Note the Big Bed is totally in the shade. Of trees that should be cut down or at least cut back. Says me.

Breakfast.

It's not yet planting weather. My perennials wont arrive until the end of the month and even that, to many, is a bit early for my growing zone. Annuals wont fill the bins until, well, ideally early May, with an eye toward the temps each evening, because should they dip below freezing, my annuals will die unless I bring them in for the night. So, planting is still a ways off. But I do have stuff to do. Get the bins and pots ready. Pull out the creeping charlie and all the other creeping crap that always invades the beds. Dig out the expanding tiger lilies out front. Dig out sprouted saplings, dandelions, quack grass. And so on.

In the late morning, I get to it. It feels a tad cool still (46f, or 7.5c), but believe me, after a couple of hours of work, keeping warm is the least of my problems. As always, my body is not used to being in a down dog yoga position (my favorite gardening posture) for so long. My hands are not used to so much pulling and twisting.

And yet, I keep at it. Any gardener will tell you that work outside is better than any meditation app out there in terms of calming your mind and clearing your head of clutter that accumulates over days, weeks, years of life. 

I work most, if not all the flower fields. Aside from the butchered tulips, things are looking grand. The leafless trees are good for the sun-starved beds (they don't shade new growth). The rains have done wonders for our parched earth (no rain last summer, no snow this winter). The chickens do scratch the beds, but the Bresse hens are not as hard on them as others who have passed through this way. And they do leave a good fertilizer behind!

By early afternoon I'm done for the day.

Time to pick up the kids.

It's Friday and we're cycling through snacks, play, books and then their lessons.

And here's a pleasurable thing -- I'm seeing more of my daughters one on one this weekend than is usually possible, given schedules and distances. I start off with a meetup with my older girl in the evening, just to chat...

 

 

... and tomorrow I'll drive down to see the younger one and her brood.

In the end, April is always kind to me. What's there not to love?!

Thursday

It's been a while since I had a contemplative day. One where I could indulge in, well, retirement nothingness. Trivial stuff that brings satisfaction, even if it is inconsequential. Today is a grandkid day of course, but I did think I could spend the morning... idly. 

Until the internet stopped working, right around midnight. Maybe earlier. It was still off in the morning. No problem! -- says Nina. I have a mobile phone hotspot!

Except that I changed payment plans last month to lower my cost and up the data usage and it turns out... that the new plan doesn't come with a hotspot. All this led Ed to wonder what kind of stupid plan I had signed onto anyway. 

There goes the morning.

And by the way, the weather is still stinky bad and I was glad that Ed was up and about early, trying to fix the Internet. He did animal duty for me. I stayed home and brooded.

Changing your phone plan is right up there with doing taxes. You have to have your smarts with you, avoiding the pitfalls, lures and secret traps. You must know what you need and what data you've used over the past 12 months. Ed pushed for switching service providers. "Your people are doing so badly I wouldn't be surprised if they soon went out of business!" -- is his assessment of my current service (ATT, are you listening?) I rolled my eyes and stayed loyal. I mean, I can hear people talk from all parts of the house. Give me a break, I'm not switching. 

We talk about phones and grandkids over breakfast.

The grandkids topic may seem like a refreshing change from cell phone service providers, but in this case, BOTH topics just make me feel like I am about three decades past my prime. I was telling Ed how much I missed Snowdrop's winter love of colorful skirts, now that she has gone kid-punk. His comment -- flowered skirts? My, you sound like a really old grandmother.

He's right, of course. I sound right up there with those who, once upon a time, would have said long hair on boys looks messy and nail polish should never move away from pearly pinks. Is that me? It cannot be!

I remember how much I loved my jeans in the decade when jeans on girls were such an affront to feminine sensibilities, whatever those were. I did not care. I was okay with affronting sensibilities. (One could argue that wearing shorts all summer here, at the farmette, even past age 70 is also an affront to sensibilities. I don't care. I wear them anyway.) Still, accepting that one granddaughter is already stepping into her own dress code comes with the realization that she, and soon all the others, will soon be in her own world of ideas about her life. My flowers and swirls of color on a full skirt may not suit her tastes now. She is her own, in this case, according to her, punk person.

(Pick up)

As for the phone stuff -- three hours. That's how long it took to finally give up on talking to my difficult service provider (ATT, that's you!) to track down a better plan -- one that they have advertised on their website, but (what a surprise!) they now know nothing about, if you call them. Finally, from them: oh you want that one! That's only for new customers... At that point, I threw down my phone. Ed picked it up and said -- dont give up! Switch services for a day and then come back as a new customer! That is indeed something Ed would do. But not Nina, who is, in Ed's opinion, so risk averse that she would not dare shuffle things around like that (and risk losing her phone number!) to save $15 per month. Indeed, in the end, I stuck with what's there. Meaning -- the morning on all this accomplished absolutely nothing except the recognition that throwing down the phone does not break it, so long as you throw it down on soft carpet.

Somewhere, in the thick of all this, Ed and I went out for a neighborhood walk. We needed the movement! And it was blustery, and sometimes, there was a sprinkle, but it felt so good to be outside again, away from screens and plans, and automobiles. Just us and the elements of a brisk April day.

(snow? mostly gone now... perhaps until next December!)

a no good good day number 2

You do understand that everything is fine, lovely, grand, but for the weather and those damn tax forms, right? I mean, the cats aren't happy, and the few blooming daffodils are downright miserable, and the bird song outside is silenced by the falling snow, so I'm not the only one griping about the wet stuff that keeps coming down, all night all day. But we're fine! Really good! Except for the weather and tax forms.

(pathetic)

It's not the kind of snow you can ski on. It's wet. It's slushy. You're better off just giving it up with the great outdoors today. My walk to the barn in the morning is rushed...

(unhappy chickens: windy, wet and altogether unpleasant out there!)

I fix breakfast (well, Ed spoke up too late to have me fix the usual bowl of fruits, so he's stuck with just an orange and scraps from my cinnamon roll)...

 

 

And then I sit down to the last arm of the tax project: my Wisconsin taxes. You always think the state ones should be easy peasy and they never are. This time at least I am not seduced by the new online filing system (that I used for my mother's Wisconsin taxes). It's a stinky operation with many bugs in it. I fill out standard forms and print them out with the intent of mailing them, the old fashioned way: with stamps, in a mailbox. Except the bundle is fat and I don't have a big envelope for it. Ed tells me -- just stick it in a regular old envelope. And if it's too fat at the creases, bite on it. That's what I do. It's very satisfying. Leaves teeth marks!

What's the postage for this fat envelope? It weighs 2.8 ounces. I'm putting on three stamps. Think that's enough?

Let me check.... Actually, you only need two.

Too late. I stuck on three.

Hand it over -- I'll take one off and use it on mine.

Ed is very frugal.

I mail the last of the tax forms in a regular old envelope, teeth marks and all. With two stamps.

And now I am done with the whole mess until next year. 

 

Now, could we have some good weather please? No? Not today? Can I bargain for tomorrow? Not then either? 

Fine, I'll be patient. April requires a lot of patience.

By the time I pick up the kids at school, the snow feels like nothing more than a wet annoyance on your clothes, your face. And the driveway is in its worst state of muddiness. No one wants to pause for photos or take photos!

Well, until the evening drop off at the little brother's school. Now's my chance to finally get Sandpiper into the act! (Sparrow is off in search of his buddy who still attends this school.)

Nice to know that tomorrow, the snow showers will end and the tax forms will be but a distant memory. April brings us plenty of rewards if you just hang in there and don't expect the best, each and every day.

a no good day

It's not really that. For one thing, it was not raining hard when I went to feed the animals. Still cold, still wet, still very few daffodil blooms out there, but I did not get drenched.

Then, Ed asked to tag along on my trip to the bakery. He never does that. Usually I bring home the fresh breads and pastries and eventually he wakes up and we eat them together. But today is voting day and he had neglected to send in his absentee ballot, so he tagged along to the bakery and had me drop him off at the voting place so that he could cast his vote. Not an important one, to be sure, but still, we are civic minded!

He asked if I wanted to hang out at a coffee shop and that was super sweet since he knows I like that sort of thing. but it was a gesture, nothing more, since I had a box of fresh pastries in the back seat. Nothing at a coffee shop would trump that, so we went home. 

Breakfast, looking awfully much like it always does. At the kitchen table.

And now comes the super slide into abysmal nothingness. The weather is so bad, so bad that a religious person might think that a divine being was sending me a clear message: do your damn taxes already, because in a week, the weather will be fine and you will have work to do in the garden, whereas we are giving you this cold and now very very wet day so that you would not be tempted to go out and take a walk or ride a bike. You will be inside, reading a book or wasting time on the internet and that is just so dumb because you could just get those taxes out of the way already.

The thing is, I cashed in on a lot of my retirement savings last year so that suddenly, my taxes, which normally have only two sources of income ( a state pension check and a social security check) suddenly have all these other details that I have to account of in my tax return.

I fell into the tax rabbit hole. Suddenly schedules were required. And worksheets had to be completed. I am sure I made endless mistakes, despite the fact that Ed helped (he is way more confident with bureaucratic forms than I am). I laughed, I groaned, we both laughed. It was insane! And then I scratched my head in puzzlement over some computational quagmire and I found a tick in my scalp! (Not unusual: we usually pick up a couple in the course of the season, but still, I almost missed that one!)

And then he got a call from his buddy and I had a question that I wanted to consult him on and so I did not finish! Did not finish, despite having devoted the whole day, up until picking up the kids, to this brain sucking task that I'm sure everyone loathes (except those who pay others to do the taxes for them, but those people then loathe the expense of paying someone for something that should be ever so straightforward).

Well, it's mostly done. At the federal level. Wisconsin taxes will have to wait until another bad weather day which, let me note, is coming straight at us tomorrow. So, we have the very real possibility of having two no good days in a row! ("No good" to a degree. We are fine and despite travel and such, we have no Covid in the household and the tick is out of my scalp. How's that for good fortune!)

I leave the house in pouring rain.

By the time I get to the school, it's no longer raining. It's snowing. Hard. The sign over the highway warns of a winter storm. Wait, winter storm? Are we in winter? 

The kids come out in heavy snow.

It takes us twice as long to get back to the farmette. The roads are slippery, the traffic is crawling.

 

(In one hour, we went from nothing to this...)

 

 

The kids scramble to get inside against the falling wet snow.

I feed them, I read with those who want to listen, we play some...

 

 

... and then I put on a Bluey episode and exhale.

I mean, it's been a rough day! (Again, relatively speaking.)

I cook soup for supper. Use up the unused veggies. Comforting soup. And as it simmers on the stove, giving off those wonderful aromas that are so fitting for this day, I bring up the tax forms again and I finish them up.

 

poetry month

April is flooded with virtue. For us, living in south central Wisconsin, the month is transformative. Blossoms proliferate. Fruit trees are covered with pink and white petals. Bees get very excited by the massive explosion of pollen and nectar. The farmers market begins its weekly sales of produce, of spring cheese, of potted plants and bunches of flowers. I plant my perennials and purchase my annuals. the grass is lush, the garden promises to be perfection itself. 

It is also the month of tax filing (that horrid American ritual that we all suffer through). A month of poetry. (I will return to this later.) A month of the first garden disappointments.

I actually saw the big failure out there last night and this morning I confirmed it: in my absence, whatever interloper (best guess: groundhog, but maybe rabbit, maybe a deer, maybe an opossum) came to my flower fields and chomped off most of the tulips.

I had asked Ed to spray them with our special hot pepper spray (very effective) in the week I was away, but the poor guy couldn't do it -- it kept raining and, well, rain would wash off any spray he'd put on. One count for the animal world: they definitely won this round. I will have no early or even midseason tulips this year.

I try not to notice this as I walk to the barn to feed the animals.

Good morning, chickens! Please dont scratch up my flower fields too much! Have a good day! 

(back to the venerable old farmhouse, before the rains came down...)

Breakfast, with the cats and with Ed.

Okay, back to poems. In honor of poetry month, I purchased You are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a compilation by Ada Limon that brings together poems by 24 American Poet Laureats (she herself is the current one). The release date is tomorrow so I can say nothing more about it (though there is a lovely piece on the book and on nature poetry in general by Margaret Renkl in the NYTimes today). But I will go back to Mary Oliver, because, well, she was my introduction to nature poetry. I discovered her late in life (like maybe 20 years ago), and very serendipitously -- while staring at a shelf in a bookstore in search of something to read while drinking a cup of coffee. I was stunned at how beautiful each line in that book was.

I dont have that first one of hers anymore. Lost in the move, given to a friend -- I really dont remember. But I do have another one near me, titled "Why I Wake up Early." There's much to love there, but I'll just give you one poem, because it is so much a reflection of my routine every single week of the year -- the placing and replenishing of flowers in a vase for the kitchen table.

 

Freshen Flowers, She Said (by Mary Oliver)

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain was tender,

and took out the tattered and cut each stem on a slant,

trimmed the black and raggy leaves and set them all --

roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies, and more whose names I dont know, in bright new water -- 

gave them

a bounce upward at the end to let them take their own choice of position, the wheels, 

the spurs,

the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,

perhaps fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of music

with nothing playing.

After you read that, I'm sure you'll never trivialize the task of arranging flowers in a vase again!

Later, I want to go for a walk. As does Ed. A nature walk, even though we are just at the cusp of the growing season, so that you would have to look hard to notice the buds, the emerging plant life. Still, breathing it all in sounds so rich!

And yet we stay home. I fall asleep on the couch. He falls asleep on the couch. We are a tired duo!

 

Okay, it's time to pick up the girl at the school.

Gone are the skirts, the colorful shirts. She is turning punk. Goth, without the negatives associated with it. Why? Because she is a girl who has her own sense of cool is why. Because she is rapidly nearing the double digits in age. 

I like the fact that this seems to make her happy. That she had to learn to tie her own shoelaces in order to wear her new lace up black boots. That she feels confident and experimental in a very innocent way.

(Besides, she promised me she'll put on a skirt just for me every once in a while. In the summer.)

Evening. Leftovers for supper! It rained good and hard tonight. All the more reason to feel sleepy. Very sleepy, on the 1st of a beautiful month.