from Albuquerque

If ever there was good luck, I have it in this: my best pals from law school days (when I was a student), all three of them, have settled in the south (in the case of one, only for the winter). Arizona, Florida, and now also New Mexico.

When we have our annual reunion, typically in February, we toss around ideas as to whose house we should visit. Madison never makes the short list. We don’t even pretend.

And so I’m in Albuquerque for the week-end. Two nights only, but my work schedule is such that it’s all I can spit out in the middle of the semester.

I’ve never been to Albuquerque before. I vaguely remember driving through some bit of New Mexico on a family road trip when I was eight, but we hardly paused. We were in a hurry to get back to New York, having spent too long in Las Vegas. (No, no, my parents did not get hooked on slot machines. My dad says some speed demon ran a light and rammed right into us, and in the early sixties it seems that the person who spoke with greatest conviction prevailed. In any case, the car needed a new front and we had to wait for it.)

But even without having ever seen any of it, I have often said that if I ever moved south, I’d probably consider New Mexico. I spoke in hypotheticals as I am certain I will never move away from Wisconsin, but still, in my imagination, New Mexico has the great combination of a decent climate and exquisite light, especially in the cold season.

My friend tells me that Albuquerque has 300 days of sunshine annually and that we should get a good share this week-end as they’ve had a great number of the nonsunny ones already. I don’t pay attention to those statistics anymore. I’ve been in too many places where they say that THEY have 300 sunny days and I’ve concluded that this means nothing at all, except maybe that someone who counts such things is rounding up to the nearest hundred.

But in fact, it is a tiny bit sunny now. And oh, so very lovely!




arriving




a detour to Los Poblanos




among chickens and goats




a walk along the Rio Grande


Light in Albuquerque: at sunset, the hills turn red.

and so it moves forward

Early this morning, I nudge Ed to get going. No time to waste. I want to go out to the farmhouse before my morning class. I want to take one last look before the official reinvention of the interior begins.

And it is a reinvention. Not entirely a complete rebuilding  – the price for that would have been too high, but a reinvention and completion of the spaces we’re stuck with.


I admire now Ed’s work on the chimney removal – from the roof, all the way down to the basement (so many chipped bricks tossed out the window for now! What do you do with charred and chipped bricks?) and I see now what he meant when he said that at this moment, the floors are being supported by two clumsily placed wooden poles. Dismantling the chimney revealed what he had long suspected -- there's not much there to brace the floors above.





And so the very first task for the construction team (Andy and his grandson, with an occasional assist from Ed) will be to support the floors. Right now you could say that they sort of undulate. More like an ocean on a breezy day than a floor in a solid farmhouse.


Andy comes and I listen to them talk about this point load and that microlam. Reassuring builders’ talk. Like we all have a game plan going.

Me, I’ve been the one that has taken on the job of reinventing a livable space (with an occasional assist from Ed). I made the call on what we can live with and what has to be scrapped or resurfaced.

In the meantime, the bugs, especially the box elder beetles keep popping up from from the cracks in the walls and ceilings – a whole new batch waking up to the almost spring air. I haven’t time to vacuum them up today. I cast one quick hungry look at the spring-like landscape – those are berry canes to the left, and fruit trees, and there is a patch intended for mushrooms underneath.





I hurry off to teach.

workers

(On the Square today) People to admire: so many who, in their daily working lives put forth an effort, over and beyond what you’d expect.





It was gratifying for me to see support for people who work.





I couldn’t witness this for long because, well, I had classes to prepare. But still, it was a good noon moment. Workers of all yoke, supporting rather than fighting one another.





And as long as I am on the subject of work, I want to also state here my deep appreciation for someone else who, in the last weeks has worked tirelessly to reconfigure the interior of a farmhouse, so that it could be the fresh and open space I would like to see there.

My traveling companion has been covered by construction dust and bits of crumbling cement for days as he has chipped away at the chimney, and then studied the place to understand what's needed to support the floors (which right now have some possibility of falling, one on top of the other).

People doing good work. I admire that.

Now, back to my textbooks.

ground

When life deals you a long hard day, maybe it’s time you had a burger?





That, at least, was my reasoning.

I have burgers maybe once every six months. Typically it would be a default option. Nothing else grabs me and so I succumb. But this burger was premeditated. I ask a friend – want to grab a burger Tuesday night?

Ed’s out of the picture. He's not a burger person. His respect for the animal that once moo-ed makes sinking teeth into a medium rare burger rather difficult.

And I am generally sympathetic. But not tonight. Tonight, I just wanted that burger.

melt down

You’d be surprised how many people do not celebrate Valentine’s Day. A meaningless day, my students tell me. Hallmark stuff. No substance behind it.

Well, yes, but isn’t a celebration of love a sweet idea? I listen to the two women selling espresso on campus talk about their evening plans. Doing anything? One asks. We went out to eat yesterday... today we’re eating the leftovers and watching a romantic movie.

So what’s unpleasant about that, you Valentine's Day detractors, you?

I’m told that Valentine’s Day is the third largest gift giving holiday on the calendar. (After Christmas and Mother’s Day). So I ask my class – you’re not much into Mother’s Day either, I suppose? Huh.

Of course, my occasional traveling friend is downright oppositional to the very idea of calendar days that require you to be a certain way, or do things outside of your personal inclination. Me, well honestly, I don’t place immense significance in Hallmark days, but I do get feisty at the idea that I haven’t a choice in the matter.

But, ultimately, the day is marked not by any Valentine, but by the weather. Sunny and warm. Or, as warm as you could possibly hope for on February 14. Snow-melting warm. Shed the puffy jackets warm. Puddles warm. Warm.




I leave work when the streams of melting snow make sidewalks shine and those walking home quite happy indeed.

by the light

My hands are raw from some cleanser or other. Figures: Sunday is cleaning day.

I finish polishing the condo. We move on to the farm house.

It is such a beautiful day!





So this is it? Home until some time in the future when it is home no more? I watch Ed greet his cat as we drive up. Man and cat.










Then, very quickly, we turn our attention to the farmhouse. (And I have to say, this may well be the most flattering photo ever taken of it.)





Ed returns to the task of dismantling the chimney...





.... I take the vacuum to the second wave of bugs that lethargically crawl out when the weather turns warmer. And another bunch, and then another. How many hundreds winter the weather in this way anyway?

Ed is tired, but the chimney demolition is almost done. We then count light switches in need of repair and I throw ads onto Craigslist for anything that someone may still find useful.

The afternoon hours move forward. I work on classes in a room that has never ending sunshine.

And quite suddenly it is evening. Ready to head back to the condo? – I ask. Ed is worn out, I can tell. Too many bricks to dismantle and throw out onto the melting snow outside.

While he showers, I take a walk down the road. Around the bend, I so often come across deer. Yes, tonight as well. One crosses the road quickly, too fast for me to take note.

Around us, the fields are picking up the hues of a setting sun. I am full of smiles. This is my backyard now. This is my block, my neighborhood.










I take a walk up the road, around the bend, just a few steps more...





The sky fills with the color of a pre-spring evening. Oh! I see a deer come out of a forest. And another! I watch, even as they are mere specks in the open fields.





More come out. Four. Then five. Then seven.

I could come closer, but why should I. Right now I am the intruder. They live here. I’m only getting ready to do so.

One minute the sky is grand, the next minute it is grander still. My road (yes, my road!) snakes up and then down... so different from an urban or even suburban landscape!





We drive back to the city and I throw one last look back at the farmette. Easy to spot, to admire. The sun is gone, but the silo stands out. And the farmhouse. It’s behind the thicket, right close to the silo.





It could be that the years, the very first three of my life, spent in the countryside of Poland, have left their imprint. This place of quiet fields and blazing sunsets sure feels like home.

making plans

It’s curious when the change happens: when you see yourself as belonging to the category of people who are thinking out loud about retirement. Yes, of course, it could be that I will be a very late retiree. It could be that I’ll never see retirement at all. Things happen. Bodies fail suddenly, savings strategies collapse. And, I quite like my work, so there’s that to consider.

Still, as more and more people around me plunge into retirement including, of course, my occasional traveling companion, and including some who are even younger than I, at some moment not too far back I began to play the game as well: how many years before I toss aside a work schedule in favor of...something else?


There is, however, the other side of the coin too: where I think I am still planning what to be when I grow up. I will write my book. I will plant yet another garden. I’ll chase foxes away from chicks, should we choose to breed chicks.


In the meantime, in celebration of a perfect near freezing temp, my older girl and I cross-country skied. She hadn’t done that since she was maybe ten, but somewhere in her there is a gliding gene, because she is both good on ice and good on snow.





Yes, time to get lost in the Arboretum.





If you have two hours to fool with, it’s not a bad place to lose yourself in. Just you and the wild turkeys.

different views

I had hearings to attend this morning, but I forgot to take the materials home with me, so that at least one important document that I sorely needed was in my office. It was the sheet specifying the starting time. 8:30? 9:30? I could not remember. And so, to be on the safe side, by 7:30 I found myself on the bus to campus, arriving at the Law School at an hour when few are there. Ah – sunrise over the Capitol. Almost like a view onto the Pantheon or St. Paul’s, there rising above the chimneys and rooftops of the city.





It turned out I was rather early. By an hour.

Presiding over these hearings is not nearly as fun and glamorous as you’d wish. I take comfort in the fact that I respect and like the remaining hearings officers (these are nonresident appeals hearings) and today the panel included one of my favorites – a woman who lives on a farm south of Madison.

I feel, now especially, that there is much to be learned about life on a farm. (Even as this panelist has farm animals and Ed’s farm only has one cat.)

She talks about how they grew their horses from one, to two, to three, to thirteen.
Thirteen??? How is it that you have thirteen horses?
They mate and give birth. And donkeys – we have donkeys too. 
Why? – I ask. 
Well, just because. 
What do you do with them?  
Feed them.

I think about why people have the things they have. Coveting horses or donkeys or goats. (Or something else.) She has a goat too.

Then there’s the cattle. She and her husband raise cattle for the beef that you and I might want.
Do you name them?
Sure. And when we give them up to the slaughterhouse, next day we’ll get the beef, neatly labeled with the cow’s name on the package.

I doubt that I could eat a steak with a name on it. Even as, every few weeks, I think longingly about having a steak or a burger.

After the hearings, I head back home. You always feel spent after listening to people present their sad stories. From Bascom Hill, I get the usual view of the Capitol, stately as ever, seen now from the campus perspective.





Much much later, I make a final trip to the plumber, reviewing the choices I had made for the farmhouse, regretting some, not others, and then I drive home, marveling at how there are so many ways of doing any one thing well.

the last of the cold days

I cannot recall a day this year when I was as tired, as worn out, as cold, as struggling to feel energetic -- as today.

It was, I hope, the last of the severely cold days. And though I have meetings and hearings tomorrow, today was the final teaching day for the week. And I ordered a large supply of coffee for the months ahead, so that should help. Things surely will look better.

In the early evening, I hurried first to a lumber mill, then to a plumber, making those quick choices one makes when the only thing that matters is to get the job of buying over and done with. Ed asks – don’t you want to consider... and I snap back – no I do not. I use choice words to make my point.

In the meantime, more than ever since I have known him, Ed is working long hours as well. Designing something for Tormach, that, and in his spare time, tearing down the chimney at the farmhouse.

The chimney must come down and it is an expensive proposition to remove it. His most unusual Valentine’s Day gift for me is that he will have done the work himself, brick by brick, so that neither of us has to pay for the demolition.

In the early evening I drive to the farmhouse to take note of his progress. The fields are still covered with snow, even as I know that this weekend, finally, we'll be getting a bit of a thaw.

I turn onto Ed’s street and I think – wow, in a couple of months this will be my street.

At the farmhouse, one problem is solved, another emerges. We discover that the light switch doesn’t work. There’s a rumbling in the wall every time you turn the living room lamps on.

Another task to put on the "to do" list.

But, I know where the lavender plant will stand. On a window sill that looks out toward the south west. With the view onto the road and the good sunsets. The farm sure does get the good sunsets.

learning Ewe

Still very cold. Snow covered cold. Bitter winter cold.







I’ll be spending spring break (which comes in mid-March, a mere four weeks away) in Ghana.

It’s not easy to travel there. The paperwork and the medical preparations alone are enough to give one pause.

Today, for example, I went for the various vaccinations and inoculations – seven, and that’s before we even began the conversation about malaria and gastric disturbances. As the nurse passed on voluminous information about the side effects of this and that, I felt, for the first time this winter, hot. Perhaps from the overdose of information and immunization.

And it’s not as if I chose the full range of preventatives. One vaccination I can have later on. You'll want it if you continue to do missionary work in Africa, she tells me.

Missionary work?? What is it about me that caused her to think that this was my reason for going to Ghana?

In fact, I am not on a mission to teach the people there about my ways at all – religious or otherwise. I merely want, for the one week I’ll have there, to make one, maybe two, maybe three children feel like they are the most special kids in the world and that someone on the other side of the globe cares about them and will travel far to play with them and laugh with them and make them feel important, even as, without parents or family, they must rely on others to fill a void. If I listen hard, I may learn some of their tribal language (Ewe). So that the teaching will be by them, rather than by me.

Good, reasonably safe volunteer work in poorer regions of the world is hard to find. I looked long and hard for something that would be culturally sensitive and would offer a needed and requested service. I wont be the only one in Ghana, of course. In fact, a small group of volunteers will be traveling there at the same time (nearly every one of them half my age). Each of us safe, or nearly safe from most of the diseases that plague the tropics.

Ah, but that all could be so lucky.

taking home lavender

The cactus has finished its period of bloom. Time to pick up something else that will brighten a February morning. Typically I’d go for the daffodils that begin to show up in grocery stores right about now. But the daffodil has a perfect moment, followed by days when it looks sad and aging. Whereas a potted bloomer lasts. And perhaps will last some more on the windowsill of the farmhouse, come spring time.

I pass over the cut flowers and buy a potted lavender that’s about to bloom.

I forget that it’s cold outside. (Lavender, at least this particular strain of lavender, doesn't like icy cold.)





Really cold. Coldest of the cold days. And I’m traveling by bus.

I wait at the stop with a potted flower that's  bundled in two plastic pastry bags. Hang in there, lavender!

Around me, I notice the snow piles, still high, still not entirely cleared around the bus stop, still, in places, burying fire hydrants.





What a winter!

I think about the little lavender and the sill where it will eventually stand, taking in the sun of a southern farmhouse exposure.

The bus comes, warm as always, I get on.

It’s hard to believe that in a month or so, I’ll be biking to work again. Not just yet though. Not just yet.

two red packs and a door

I have to accept that this week is going to be somewhat of a wash. I expect to be in my office most daylight hours. It is so difficult to post on days like these...

My last class on Monday ends at an hour when Bascom Mall is dark and quiet. I sometimes look for a live body then, just to exchange a greeting, or comment, but most often I find no one.


Earlier, at midday, I look outside and I think there can be nothing more satisfying than a spot of espresso. There, through the red doors of the Education Building I can find one. It's good to have Education close to Law.





It's snowing. A delicate, sweet snow.


Later, significantly past the hours when one can still catch a snippet of news on TV, I stop at the shop where I used to moonlight last year.

It reminds me that the demands on my time could be even greater now. They were last year in these cold winter months.

I pick up a jar of plum blossom cream and go home to cook dinner.

appliances and Packers

I sip my glass of wine and half watch the football game. I’m glad the Packers are doing well as many of my friends and loved ones care about their success.

But my attention is on running through a list of things accomplished and things to accomplish down at the farmhouse.

For example, what Ed and I did accomplish today was to pick out and purchase 99% of the appliances for the farmhouse kitchen. It took a while. Internet searches and consumer reports and user reviews. Have you ever read user reviews? Powerful stuff – especially the damning ones. Equipped with a list of items that passed the first round, we set out to compare prices. Sears will (and did) beat anything you come up with elsewhere and so we gave a salesclerk a huge reward for having to work on Super Bowl Sunday – we gave him that 99% kitchen appliance sale.

(And I have to admit that we spent less on four major appliances than I did on the refrigerator alone for the condo.)

So what’s with the one missing per cent? It's the wine cooler. I want what I have in the condo: a cooler that has at least a four dozen bottle capacity, one that isn't jarring and ugly,  and one that maintains a steady temp.

It appears that these small little chilling boxes cost more than refrigerators twice their size. Not only that: it seems, from the reviews, that most people absolutely hate their wine coolers. The low ratings are astonishing and befuddling. I mean, we’re asking a box to maintain a steady, somewhat cool temperature. How hard is that? All other purchased appliances have far more complicated tasks set before them and they do them all nearly flawlessly.

Ed tells me wine coolers are for snobs and there aren’t enough out there to warrant a push toward perfection.

Snobs? I just have these favorite bottles. Some are priced for less than $15. Too good to open, I admit, and deserving of a comfortable temperature.

My traveling companion tells me that I need to drink down the bottles I have in my cooler and buy a small little chill box for the specials I may pick up in the future.

Drink down??? Oh, but I can’t. What would warrant my opening a bottle of Chablis I purchased six years ago while writing a story about Chablis wine growers? Or the bottle gifted to me by the producer whose wine harvest I attended four years back? Or the Portuguese bottle I bought on the January day when the sun was so warm and the spray of salty air so fine along the shores of the Atlantic? No, I can’t do it.

Still, I’m extraordinarily proud of all we accomplished -- appliances, super cheap farmhouse lamps for the ceiling... our progress is solid.

Let me put aside wine chillers and go back to game watching. The Packers aren’t as solid as they were an hour ago. Maybe I ought to think Packer thoughts. Go Packers. Yeah.

transition

[First – a thank you to my all the commenters, always. You have been especially fun and funny and sweet in the last days and months, and I deeply appreciate all your writings on Ocean.]

Today we shook hands in agreement, Ed and I. (Not that we fully understand the terms of the agreement just yet, but still, it was a solid shake.) I know this much: slowly I’ll be shifting my belongings to the farmhouse. Come April, I’ll be where I was in the first years of my life: amidst farmlands and, well, farmlands.

We spent the morning going from Menards to Home Depot to lumberyards and plumbing retail outlets. I have been working with an old friend in construction (Andy Anderson) who has seen me through hefty home improvements in the past, to come up with a plan for the farmhouse that is basic and clean. We agreed today on what needs to be done and how to go about doing it.





Yes, there are crumbling walls, broken stairs, missing ceilings. Yes, there are odd holes, cracks, chips and unmatched surfaces. But surely it’s doable. Andy will build, Ed will tackle the outliers, and I can stain and seal. We are set to go.





Ed still marvels that I want to put that much effort into restoring something that is not built with modern sensibilities in mind. Nor is it especially efficient in design. And the neglect has been tremendous.

But I do. And I’m even okay with the downside: the necessary drive to a grocer, the mosquitoes (they are especially dense in this part of Dane County come summertime), the stepping onto a turf that is not my own. There’s a lot of outdoor work too, and I don’t mind.

It’s all part of the idea that I have – whereby the better part of the soft seasons (spring, summer) will be spent on a combination of outdoor work and writing work, and the rest -- the harder seasons, they’re for my classroom life. And one of the best things about the farmhouse is that it’s a mere twelve minutes by car to campus. Or 45 minutes by bike. Or split in equal portions between the two.


In the meantime, tonight we did the very urban thing of going to Sundance Theaters with my older girl and to Porta Alba for pizza afterwards. I have to soak up those last bits of city life. Before I turn into a pumpkin and bask in the sprawling farmed fields to the south of Madison.

writing it down

In an unusual confluence of pressures and demands, both Ed and I hurriedly went off to attend to work issues early this morning. But somewhere in the middle of those early hours, I took time to look at the NYTimes and I allowed myself to be amused by this article (on the subject of the proliferation of writers who want to publish, for the world to see, their memoirs).

I like the opening line: A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.

But I don’t like the overall message: that if you live an ordinary life, you do not deserve to see yourself in print.

I never thought that it is the extraordinariness of life that made you an interesting candidate for a memoir (though obviously extraordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances have a foot in the door there). Instead, I thought it was about whether you had an original story to tell and could tell it well. Original need not be fame-driven or revolutionary in nature.

Then, toward the end of the article, I see that the author has a message to those who do not have either an interesting story to tell or the ability to craft something halfway readable: go blog.

Well, sure, you can do that, but why equate a blogging field with a pile of nothingness? If you’re going to have a boring and poorly written blog, isn’t that going to give you the same meager returns as a boring and poorly written memoir would?

People write for many reasons. I see no reason to discourage anyone from writing. If you don’t want to read fragile efforts of another soul, on paper or on the Internet – don’t then! But if someone writes, and there is even only one other person who reads her or his writing (a mother? a friend?) then we’ve got a conversation going. And what could be better than two (or more) people, groping to understand one another.


In other news, after attending to the nagging details of work, Ed and I broke away and by 4, we were at Owen Park. Just five minutes from my condo, infinitely pretty but especially in the late daylight of a winter day.





We clicked into our skis and took off. I was so dazzled by the light in the woods and over the prairie, that I managed to crash at the bottom of a steep descent.






Serves me right. In the same way that people ought not text and drive, they should also not ski and take photos.





And did I mention that I had the pleasure of watching, for a brief second, a wild turkey consider seriously the possibility of befriending Ed?





The turkey thought better of it and flew away.

Wet, somewhat cold, but ultimately satisfied, we returned home and Ed fell asleep before I even finished dinner.

chairs

It’s not that I dislike winter, it’s just that I like spring and summer so much more. Is there a person who doesn’t prefer the first daffodil to the second, third, fourth blast of arctic air?

It was a cold day today. But, I had a few minutes between classes and Thursday is cheap latte day at the UBS coffee counter off Library Mall and so I pushed myself out the door for the walk down the hill.

And I’m glad that I did. I was flooded with kind feelings toward the sunshine and the crisp air and I thought – this isn’t bad (even as I know that spring is better).

And I wanted to extend my walk a little further, with a detour to the lake. That was cool (in all meanings encapsulated therein). This year the Union Terrace chairs are put away for the winter season, but if you want chairs, you’ll find some, because the artist (and MFA candidate at UW) Hongtao Zhou has created for us chairs, out of the waters of Lake Mendota.





They look like they’re the grandfolk of chairs – lived through storms and still here to tell us about it. The artist began the project just last week (you need a good dose of cold before you can reap the waters from the lake, mix them with snow and mold anything durable out of it all), before the storm. To me, they look all the more majestic, if a bit frazzled.





I thought of sitting in one and then decided against it. Enough to have had this solo moment with them, out on the lake, just me and a bunch of icy chairs.

the silence after the storm

It is one quiet world out there. As if the Super Bowl came to Wisconsin a few days ahead of schedule and even the bus drivers stayed home to watch.

Early, at daybreak, the storm had weakened, or at least moved on. It left behind a white and silent world. From my rooftop, the normally busy University Avenue looks car-less, deserted.





In the afternoon, I take a walk. I mean it to be short – the wind is biting, the temperatures are low. But I get caught up in this wonderfully pristine world of the day after. Plowed, yes, by now its plowed. But white nonetheless.





The distribution of snow is uneven. In some places it is modestly deep. In others it is immodestly deep.





I come across a team, busily digging up a sidewalk. Looking for something ? – I ask. The fire hydrant, they tell me.

Ah, red. You can’t see red if it’s buried in snow.

You can, however, spot it if it’s on a branch. Even partly hidden in bramble, it stands out in this still and powder white world.

blizzard

When the chancellor of my university announced tonight that the campus would be closing tomorrow because of the blizzard, I was disappointed. And then shocked that I should be disappointed. I ought to be dancing jigs and thinking of the many ways I can make use of a free day. And yes, there's that, but I must be honest – I wanted to teach my classes tomorrow.

And perhaps this, more than anything else will allow you to understand how much I love working with law students.


I left school late (office hours today) and the bus was so crowded that the driver almost refused to let all anxious riders board. [Future mayor of Madison: if you want residents to ride the city buses, you must have enough space for them to get on board.] It was not the perfect bus for me – an express, one that took me beyond the grocery store. I had to backtrack.

The wind was vicious and the snow was verging on brutal. Are you okay? – someone asked as I struggled with two grocery bags back to the condo. Yes, yes, you need to get hardy in life.

It’s been a tough season for so many. And I, too, look forward to a Feb. 2nd groundhog who will predict a speedy spring. I just wish that I could stay on track and be in class tomorrow.

crazy snow

Oh, to have many irons in the fire... To invest in a number of possible outcomes and anticipate that at least some (maybe all?) will come to pass – ah, that’s satisfying!

But, it means, too, that time zips by with the speed of falling snow.

And there is a lot of falling snow right now. Madly swirling. I take note fleetingly on my walk home from the bus stop.





Only fleetingly. At home, I have work to do, irons to put into fires.

Or, in the alternative, I can finish my work and put the feet up and watch a late show. And pick up on the irons and the fires another day.