memorial

Not sure what to call it -- a memorial for my mother? A gathering of close ones, on her behalf? Or, as the funeral parlor would have it -- a scattering? Maybe all of the above?

We set aside today for this. Or, part of this day. The two young families, a friend, my ex and his partner. And me of course. Ed stayed home because he's still not past his kidney drama. Besides, I'll be spending the night with the young family up from Chicago. And in fact, he has heard plenty of commemorative thoughts, listened to loads of mom issues that needed to be resolved by me, helped move each time I had to move her, taught her everything she knew about computers, fixed broken this, broken that. Today I told him he should stay home.

My mother repeated many times that she did not want any ceremony once she died. But, she wasn't always trustworthy on these things. She said no when she meant yes. And anyway, I was going to listen to the kids on this one. And they were clear: they want something to commemorate her life. And I honestly think she would have liked what we did today. I think.

It's Saturday and I start the day in my usual way.

I skip the market once again. It's winding down for me. I'm back to picking up most of my produce at the grocery store. 

Breakfast with a very tired Ed. It's not early, it's just that things are dragging him down right now. Let me perk him up with a duo photo. To show off his clean shaven face! And my burnt croissant. Never put a pastry on the upper level of a toaster oven. Live and learn.

By late morning, I pack a small bag and head out toward the lake. Not our local lake. We're meeting up at Harrington Beach State Park. It's by Lake Michigan and yes, thank goodness, the weather is just perfect for this. My mom loved sunshine (in California, it was sunny all the time, she'd remind me every time we had a cloud cover) and considered sunbathing to be virtuous and invigorating. She stuck with it all the way through last summer. Today is one sunny day!

The idea is to do the ceremony in that shore-front park. In her one hundred years of life, I can't really say that my mother developed a special attachment to any particular place. Yes, she liked New York. And she liked living in Berkeley. But neither place tugged at her heart once she moved away. The one place that she did seem somewhat sentimental about was Cross Village -- on the Michigan shores of Lake Michigan. In their later years, her parents ran a guest house for Polish workers there. She would come up often, to help, maybe to play -- I don't really know, she would never admit to playing. But it was a formative moment in her life. She was a young adult, at the cusp of marriage, and at the brink of leaving America to return to Poland. She was afraid of McCarthy and she thought my dad, who was deeply infatuated with her, was quite an interesting prospect. He said come travel with me to Poland to check it out, and so she did. Can't say that she was thrilled with what she found there, but, within a year or two they got married, she got pregnant, her parents followed her back, and so she stayed in Poland. For a while, anyway. I am absolutely sure she would not want to be scattered in Poland, even though her father is somewhere there. (Her mother is splashing around in the Pacific as best as I can figure out.)

Cross Village itself was (is) a nothing spot. It really is just a village -- Ed and I drove up there some fifteen years ago, just to see what it's like. (I wrote about it here.) But it has my grandparents written all over it -- for me, but especially for my mother. And in her last days, all she would talk about was a return to her own mother and father. The shores of Lake Michigan it is then. A scattering of ashes, a memorial.

*     *     *

First stop: Homewood Suites, northwest of Milwaukee. I'll meet the younger family here. It's our overnight and they'll be my chauffeurs for the remainder of the day.

They're here! Last minute getting ready...

We drive to Harrington Beach State Park. It's a beautiful spot with a nice stretch of shoreline and a wooded space hugging the waters. When you step out onto the sandy beach you notice one thing: it is windy today! I mean, like you wouldn't believe! The waves are huge!

But it is sunny. Someone may say -- too windy. I'm going to retort -- but sunny and wildly beautiful!

Everyone arrives. All here. All wanting to be here.

 

 

(cousins)

(all of us; thank you, Carey, for taking this photo)

I read three poems. Szymborska, Oliver, and Anonymous.

The younger family has prepared a song. I Walked With You a Ways.

Snowdrop reads a meaningful passage from a book... 

Sparrow reads a bit of a story that is a hand-down from his great grandma.

My older girl speaks. Memories. Good ones.

We end with a song that is possibly the only one we all associate with my mother. She sang it to me, she sang it to my kids. Is it a little wistful? Or maybe it speaks of a resignation... I sing the first verse, each daughter sings one after, we all join in on the chorus. que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be... (Did you know it was written for a Hitchcock movie? Doris Day sang it in The Man Who Knew Too Much. 1956.)

The wind is so strong! But we scatter ashes, mindfully, not so that they blow back straight at us. We take turns...

My mother belongs to the earth, the water, the sun, stardust. And to our collective past. We are here because she was once here.

*     *     *

We eat dinner at the Twisted Willow Restaurant in Port Washington -- a town that hugs the shores of the lake. It once was a vital commercial outpost. These days it relies more on tourism and nearby Milwaukee to stay afloat, and indeed, to prosper.

Dinner is lovely. Albums from my mother's early years are passed around. The kids play, the adults talk.

And afterwards, we linger still, on the "village green," where the cousins romp and we adults stay a bit more somber. Carey, our family friend shares his recollections of my mother. We listen, nod, understand.

How those five young ones love this moment of utter closeness, out there on the village green of Port Washington...

And then its time for goodbyes. 

I ride over to Wauwatosa with the younger family. They play music, the girls sing along. Dolly Parton, other songs too. And I remember one family car trip from my teen years: my mother, my father, my sister and me. It was raining hard on this particular day and my father was trying to push forward anyway. In the back seat, my sister and I sang songs we'd learned around Polish campfires with our friends. We harmonized some. One song. Another. And another.

Later, in a rare show of gratitude, my mom thanked us. These weren't the best years for her, for my father. They weren't getting along much anymore and the years were pot-marked with silences and recriminations. But on this one car ride we, our songs, put a smile on her face. I felt I had on that day made her happy.

Friday

One more day of steady work outside. The parking lot bed is a mess. Weeds, an excessive spread of phloxes, the encroaching hydrangea, and did I mention weeds? A cleanup is in order. Sigh... a cleanup is always in order. Everywhere. House, yard, yard, house. You have to turn a blind eye to most of it or else all your time will be sucked up by cleaning, straightening, clipping, scrubbing, brushing, dusting, digging...

The morning is cool, but once again, with a promise of a pretty day. Kind of incredible, considering the weather chaos in the south.

I pick up bakery treats downtown. Stocking up, now that we have an easy reheat system going!

 

 

 

Breakfast. Cinnamon rolls, fruits, flowers from the market. Ed needs a beard trim: add that to my list of cleanups!

Now to work. Dig, pull, move Lost Lilies. Again. And again. 

I ask Ed for help in cleaning out a pathway. And in loading a cart full of chips. And still I use up the whole morning, all those hours until it's time for me to get the kids. Dig, pull, move Lost Lilies. Chip. 

Ed says -- you must like doing this. He knows he's going to get a "yes and no" answer out of me. I like the results, I like some of the work, and I think all of it is good for me.  I love the satisfaction of getting a job done. I don't like doing a half-assed job and knowing that I left too much behind. 

He continues -- picking out flowers and hotel rooms for your trips, yep, your favorite tasks.

Alright, mr. smartie pants. Not exactly my favorite tasks... But he is right: I can lose myself in this work and completely let go of the feeling of time passing. The clock becomes irrelevant. The focus is on imagining how a flower will look come spring, or how I will feel waking up in that room, far away from home, far away from a to-do list. Far away. It's all very satisfying!

 

The kids are in good spirits.

 

 

Call it end of the week joy!

And toward the end of the afternoon, after I drop them off, I return to the flower fields, finishing off a few of them before the light fades.

I notice that I work in circles. I began the cleaning operations in the fields closest to the farmhouse door and slowly I expanded my reach. This Fall, I've done everything but the fields by the sheep shed and the field by the road. Somehow you always want order closest to your home and you're more comfortable with chaos the farther you step away from your little nest. There are pockets of total chaos in the farmette lands -- behind the writers shed, in the far corners of the property. We don't really mind that. Order can be stifling and of course the animals, the insects -- they thrive in the thickets, not the neatly weeded spaces. 

Still, I'm glad I worked hard to tidy the flowers fields this year. It will be much easier to attend to them in spring. That's the hope!

with love...

Thursday

The better the weather, the more intense my gardening work. I'd say that work reaches the level of "frantic" right now. The weather is that spectacular! And I'm running out of time.

I'm weeding still -- this time, in addition to working some more on the Big Headache (aka Big Bed), I also hit the bed around the black walnut that the Madison Gas and Electric people took down (the tree grew right in the middle of my secret path bed). And, too, I'm moving Lost Lilies. You dont know about Lost Lilies? Those are the ones I planted a while back and then all sorts of stuff grew around them (phloxes, monardas, rudbeckias mainly) and they got lost somewhere in that thicket. I still check up on them all July long, but I'm the only one who knows where they are. These girls are totally invisible to the outside world. So, I'm slowly moving some of them out. Like maybe six per year. (Yes, there are that many!) To better spaces. May they thrive.

But first, of course, there is that morning routine...

(Out back: our melon field is filling up with ripe ...melons!)

And that morning breakfast. 

You know what's really amazing and totally incomprehensible to a person who grew up in postwar Poland? That yesterday at breakfast, Ed and I talked about getting a tiny toaster oven and with a couple of clicks of a finger, there arrived last night a box with just that, so that this morning, I took out two frozen croissants, out them on a tiny tray, and in five minutes -- perfection!

This right now is my cooking station for just about everything I cook on a daily basis:

Ed would add to it our mini microwave and I do also have a pot for making tea water. Amazing how small changes can simplify your life!

Okay, then comes the frantic work and sure enough, I look at my watch and I see that it's time to pick up the kids.

Thursday is our local market day. I'm thinking it may be the last one I take the kids to. I'll miss the next two and the last one in October is likely to have poor weather, only because we've had nothing but great markket weather this fall, and all good things must come to an end. So we rejoice extra hard at the loveliness of it all. (As always, Ed joins us at the market.)

(He picks doughnut, she pick cookie)

(how about these?)

(drawn to the artsy stuff)

(not too old...)

(cheese curds and one last time -- corn)

(to the farmhouse...)

Play at home, drop off kids, bike with Ed.

I've been so busy, that biking has fallen off for me, which is a shame because Fall is great for bike rides. No matter: tonight we bike.

 

 

And sure enough, that wave of sleepiness washes over me pretty quickly! And still, we linger on the couch, because, well, a couch evening is about as special as it gets. Calm, with a movie and a few squares of chocolate. Happy.

Wednesday

Beautiful blue skies, shiny and clear window panes on the porch ceiling, golden meadow grasses, purple asters, and the ever persistent white gladioli. That's what awaits me this morning.

Oh, and dont forget about the white Bresse girls.

What's there not too love??

We almost take our breakfast outside, but even in the later hours of the morning, the air is cool, the warmth of the kitchen beckons.

We discuss ovens. The switch to Induction is too complicated and requires too much destruction and reconstruction at the farmhouse. And so we're on a path of compromise: we work with one induction plate and I am lobbying to acquire a mini toaster oven so that we need not use the gas stove for every reheat that I do (croissants come to mind!). 

In the end Ed agrees to get a cheap one if I agree to get rid of one other appliance. Easy peasy: out goes the toaster. Whoever even toasts things anymore! 

Our gas-less cooking future is looking rosy!

 

Now, about those flower fields. I go out to weed the Big Bed. As you have probably figured out, the Big Bed is... big. And prone to weeds. This last characteristic can be applied to all flower fields, but the Big Bed manages to hide the weeds when they're small and before you know it, I have myself a Big Bed of big weeds. I've been spot cleaning it for weeks now, but that means the edges look decent, while the interior sucks. I attack that interior today, which takes forever and at the end of the morning I'm only about half done. The nagging question for me is this: should I even bother? At this late stage, the weeds that will seed a new generation of weeds will have done this by now; I can't take that back. But the weeds themselves -- are some perennials?  Some are, but there are lots that are a mystery box for me. DO I really need to dig them all out? Wont it be easier to clean the beds in spring?

It's one of the many many questions that I have about flower growing that in my nearly fifty years of gardening I've never answered for myself: what to do when. And of course, it's not only a matter of what's good for the garden. There is, too, what's better for me. In spring, I have enthusiasm for gardening. In autumn -- it feels more like a chore. On the other hand, in spring, I have a huge to-do list. In autumn, my list grows small. 

So I weed. To give myself a head start on spring clearing.

 

My second task for today is to prepare the pots for wintering over inside. Which ones? And how best to get them ready for indoor life? You can winter over most anything, but some flowers do best if you give them a quiet and cool winter, say in the basement, with minimal care then, and intense care come early spring. Do I really want to fuss with that? And as every year, I throw out my Big Idea: why don't we construct a greenhouse? I could winter over most everything then!

Ed doesn't want a greenhouse and in truth, I'm not keen on expanding my gardening into the cold season. I need my farmer's rest season! Still, when I look at all that color that will vanish with the first frost, it's tempting to reconsider. 

 

 

Gardening dilemmas! They are such a good topic for a restless mind! You weigh one idea, throw it away, try another. In the end, most ideas come and then vanish. To return at another time, another year perhaps. 

 

And of course, by this time I must hurry to pick up the kids. One of them had a tough day at school. Some meanness occurred, tears were shed. We talk about it.

It's always tough to both comfort and toughen up a child who faces unpleasantness at school. Of course, at some point, bullying can be so severe that adult intervention is the only way to manage it. But the reality is that there will always be kids who are just plain obnoxious and you want your grandkid to manage at least some of that on his/her own. 

Since overall the school year is going well for both, by the time we approach Tati's Cafe, both kids are in great moods. Sparrow, as usual, hits the dominoes.

Snowdrop asks for something special which her friends have tried and I've never heard of -- a Boba drink. She picks one with brown sugar bobas. So far as I can figure out, it's another way to push a sweet beverage on us. I've not been missing much! (Luckily she likes the bubbles. Not so much the beverage.)

Farmhouse.

Books and games, then they're gone and Ed's biking and it's just me. My quiet moment. Eh, overrated. I wait to reheat the soup, to turn on a movie. Ed'll be home soon.

Tuesday

I took on tidying up that side-of-the-driveway flower bed and I aim to finish it! It's a must do. By the time the bulbs arrive, I want spaces cleared, beds ready. Well, maybe that's a bit ambitious. But that's the target for the next few good weather days.

But first, morning animal chores and a walk through a very autumnal garden.

And then a delightful pause once more for breakfast with my friend. Over at Lakeside Cafe, where the bakery treats are very low key, almost nonexistent, but the atmosphere is so very pleasant.

(It's hard to find a place that has all three going for it: ambiance, good baked goods, good coffee. Once things move indoors, the space and oftentimes the noise level become an issue. Ah well. We go for ambiance today!)

And now comes my intensive gardening work, all to the sound of chain saws working away. The tree cutters are doing their roadside once-every-handful-of-years maintenance, trimming trees that grow close to the electrical wires. Ed hates this butchering of his beloved trees and hides under a quilt inside all day. Me, I'm glad for the sunlight that will get through the dense foliage of some of our tree canopy. The trees will survive this surgical necessity. And anything that grows at their base will thrive. Win win, in my opinion.

(Well, two trees were completely taken down. So, more sun light on this bed, but the sight of piled up logs makes for a very unhappy Ed!)

Okay, the flower field by the driveway is cleaned up and chipped, ready for the bulb influx. Drab and dreary now, but I'm hoping for color come spring and summer!

 

And this is how it gets to be time to pick up the kids. Well, once again just one kid. This one. 

 

 

 

(The other has an appointment.) She brings home a password handed to the kids in school for a computer game (because what we really want for our kids is more screen time!). Ed helps her set it up. Fine, a few minutes wont hurt and she is so happy with it!

 

 

 

Too, we finish a book, which feels deeply satisfying: there's so much good stuff out there to read together and each time we find a gem it stays with you, in much the same way that some adult books stay with you for a long long time (while others are instantly forgettable, so that when I come across them in my Kindle, marked as "read," I think -- really? I read that? I wonder what it was about ...).

 

Evening. Soup making time! Ed is home, I am home, Fall is with us. Soup time for sure.

With love...

Monday energy

 This day would have proceeded along a different track had it been gray, wet, or cold. But it's none of those things. Yes, it's cooler -- shorts are out now until maybe May (I speak for myself -- Ed wears them year-round). But the sun is out and I am motivated! (Possible the vaccination fatigue has receded. Or, maybe I am like a yo-yo that can never stay in one spot, with one trend, a single idea ("reading in the fall!") for long.

A morning walk feels radiant!

Breakfast -- well, inside. And oatmeal! Something I bring out only in the cooler seasons.

I take a quick walk, alone because Ed is tied up with his machining discussions. And then I attack, really attack the side flower bed by the driveway. I am determined to keep it neat and pretty this coming growing season. It's one of the more modest flower fields because I planted it early on in my life at the farmette, and I was rather random -- some uninteresting lilies went in (yes, there are plenty of those around), some bearded irises (they are a challenge and they topple and they have a very short blooming season), some spiderwort. By midsummer there are weeds everywhere and I always wonder -- why do I treat this bed so poorly, given that it is the most visible one to anyone who comes up the driveway? I'm not replanting most of it, but I did put in some new lilies a few weeks ago and today I dug up many bucketfuls of weeds. Tomorrow I'll chip it and later on I'll put in some spring bulbs.

Three hours of outdoor work. On the one hand -- I'm spent. On the other hand, as always after a spell of intense garden digging -- I'm relieved that I can still do it.

Just Snowdrop today after school...

The girl is growing so fast! This isn't one of those hyperbolic truisms that a grandparent might say. She really is shooting up there. At nearly 55 inches now, she is very quickly approaching adult height levels. Of course, she is in fourth grade. Kids, girls especially, have their growth spurt just at that age. I look at her and I think -- wow, not a little one anymore.

It's ballet eve for her. Just as we are heading out to her studio, Ed calls out asking if she wants to help him pick some pears. She loves these farmette jobs!

The pears in my opinion are just okay, but there's something uniquely special about fruits you picked yourself. Especially with a fruit picker!

In the evening, I take her to her studio and go on to grocery shop, while Ed goes out for one last dinner with the Polish engineer. It means the farmhouse is extra quiet once again when I return. Now's the time to take out my kindle! And I do. My Fall reading moment is now...