reporting

I am at the café up the road from the farmhouse. I’m reading about the life of a Russian poet who was exiled to America not too long ago. How difficult is it to write a short but excellent poem every day?

At the café, the barista – an earnest and kind young man who wont chase after you if one day you leave having forgotten to pay – is talking on the phone about the storms that destroyed homes and lives over and beyond what is normal for the Midwest. How could it be, how could it be...

I’m glad in writing small daily posts here, I do not have to report damage and destruction. Our storms yesterday evening threw down sheets of rain...





...then the skies cleared and we ate a Sunday dinner without a trace of wetness outside.

I’m glad, too, that I have the last of the apple blossoms to admire...





...that a trip to town today is delightfully cool and balmy so that our Madison skyline looks luminous and honorable.





There had been some gunfire in the neighborhood we traveled through and police redirected us to back streets to avoid any danger. But we never knew what the danger was and indeed, like the storms, the danger seems to have traveled elsewhere.


Tragic poems are born of tragic circumstances. I’m so glad that today I get to report that Ed finished replacing rotten boards outside, I continued to experiment with ant discouragement (the latest: coffee grounds from the café up the road), and the sun shown on my tulips inside. Nothing more.

country days

You could spend days, weeks even, at the farmette and not see or talk to anyone at all. We don’t do that. The daughters visit, I check in with my office and we have a rather steady habit of going to the café up the road, just before it closes at 3. And, of course, there are the deliberate visits with friends in town.

And still, each day begins with a sense of removal and distance. As if I put myself in exile, broken only if the will is there to do it.



Again I am up at dawn. You’d think I’ve seen all there is to be seen at sunrise, but that’s not so. Today, for instance, there are wisps of cloud that filter light in new ways. When the sun does break through, the early morning rays, paired with the lightly green of the now fully clothed tree limbs push aside the tedious stuff of the past month – the move, the mice, the twisting roots of weeds in the flowerbeds – all made small, because in the morning, I can take a solitary walk along the road and admire this:





I walk through the fields that are now farmed by the truck farmers -- all Laotian, bringing to Madison's farmers markets, as the the famously wonderful R.W. Apple of the NY Times once said -- a suggestion of bigger and better flavors than those we're so used to.
















I nudge my girl to go walking with me. Her heart says yes, but her tired urban soul keeps her in the farmhouse room, the lemon room, where lilacs bend toward her window and the smell of May and the smell of pine doors and floorboards makes her sigh and drift further into sleep, unbothered by the sound of birds and sparrows, robins and somewhere, not too far, mating cranes. Apple blossoms pave the path outside, bumble bees hover around the blossoms that remain, and if this all doesn’t feel remote and far from downtown Chicago, or downtown Madison then I don’t know what does.







She is to return to the city this evening, but for now we do country things – she wants the rhubarb compote my reader noted in one of the Ocean comments and so we pick many many stalks of this pleasantly tart vegetable, chop them up and set it all on the stove to simmer.






We’re to eat a meal in town later in the morning, with others joining us, but still, this is the kind of warm day where a bowl of fruit with honey and kefir, a chunk of a doughnut, a cup of coffee, are a good excuse to stay on the porch for a while and talk about cats, old barns and jobs, and all things in between.

a song

Spring winds are blowing, blossoms are growing, dancing like children, out on the green...

Don’t mind me. Just go about your business. I have to do this – it is the peak of the spring blooming season – I must take note of it here, on Ocean.





I meet my younger girl at the farmers’ market. We always meet right here, by the L’Etoile (these days Graze) food cart.





She’s up north for the week-end; indeed, she’ll be my first overnight guest at the farmhouse. And I clean in preparation for this, as if the farmhouse needed cleaning, as if I didn’t make fun of my grandmother for cleaning in preparation for our visits many years ago.












We walk the market, drinking in the lilacs, the lilies of the valley, all of it and no, I do not need to buy flowers – I have plenty back at the farmette, but my favorite vendors are showing off blooms proudly, inexpensively and so I sample some of theirs, to compare, to enrich what is at home.











At home. Ed and I are tackling issues in the garden. Ant hills in flower beds. Weeds, always the weeds. The horribly invasive bramble that crawls underground, looking for a place to poke through. Ed is dumping shredded bark (free, from Madison; thank you Madison!) in great amounts in any number of places. I dig, plant, pull out – all of it, until it’s time for supper.










At the farmhouse, I am honoring the spring trilogy – the flowers that are such a gift now, a heady mix of – yes, of course, lilac, and (from our yard) lilies of the valley. Childhood pals of mine, now again growing under my nose. And tulips. Don’t forget the tulips.
















Together at last.






Okay, done posting about May flowers. Tomorrow, I’ll try to look beyond the garden. It’ll be hard.

misty dreams

Follow your dream, reach for the stars, don’t settle for less. By the time both daughters went through all their various graduations – from nursery school onwards, I’d heard so much of this that I thought cliché was too generous a word for such repeated advice.

As if we grow up with an image of where we want to be as adults. As if it inevitably includes some combination of fame and fortune. For a recognition of a talent that, in truth, we do not really have.





When I was a teen – the age when you hear the greatest concentration of these messages (except that I didn’t, but that's a story in its own right) – I wanted to have the boy of my deepest affections reciprocate my passion for him and when he eventually did, for a brief while anyway, I wanted to be in couplehood with him for life, so that we would, together, take May walks along the riverbank and kiss feverishly on a bed of pine needles in the Polish forests we tended to pass through. Some dream! Had it come to pass, most assuredly it would have skidded down to nightmare status very very quickly.

In the end, I married young (by today’s standards) and for love, and I had perfect children and a job that permitted some degree of time with these perfect children. I think most would agree that that is one lucky package right there. If I had been offered fame, I would have taken it out of curiosity, but I would have preferred it to be for some irreverent oddity rather than for my life’s work in academia. And though we could have used more money, especially to pay off college costs and afford ourselves solid debt-free vacations with the perfect girls, I did not especially want to be rich. Small and simple always seemed more attractive than the alternative.

I did, early on, want to write in a more serious fashion. But this wasn’t a dream. It was more of a goal. Eventually, I will write in a more serious fashion, I told myself. I still say this and I think I have even convinced myself (if not too many others) that it will happen.

But what of dreams?

When I was a wife and mother, I mean, in the thick of those functions, I often dreamt that I was back in the Polish village where I spent so many of my childhood years and summers. My grandmother, who was my de facto mother for the first three years of my life, often made an appearance in those dreams (she still does). Little wisps of her would come through, a word, a smile, a guest in a dream that was of a time and place where bees buzzed and lilacs bloomed and blueberries came to us in big blue enamel coated buckets.





But I did not want to return to Poland. You have become too Americanized – my friends there would tell me and they wouldn’t be wrong. As I kept dreaming of this Polish village, I began to think that maybe my dream was to have a summer house – say in the south of France?

I read a lot of books about expats who bought houses in the south of France. It seemed, in the end,  a financial drain and burden. And those with second homes in distant places hadn't the strong attachments I continue to have to the perfect, albeit grown up daughters. I could not happily leave them for chunks of the year to make home improvements four thousand miles and six times zones away. Email and Skype notwithstanding.





Thinking back to my teens, I would not have said that reaching for stars would include hoping to live in a small, old, but greatly improved farmhouse that resembles in some ways the Polish village house I loved (notably both have lilacs and a roving cat). And that I would maintain a challenging but also flexible work schedule, with periods of time to write, or not write, or plant perennials in the way that my grandfather did. No, I wouldn't have thought any of that and that would be a shame. Because when I wake up now, not exactly alone, but most certainly not, thank God, coupled with the boy of my teen dreams, I think that, when all is said and done, what I most appreciate and love about my days now, is that on this misty morning, I have the freedom to take my breakfast out to the front porch, take in a whiff of that lilac and think – now, what should I be doing with this day?

hopscotch

Hear that?

What?

In the attic.

No, not mice. Something else. We don't know what. We talk about laying some traps, but the idea of crawling up there once a day to check on them is enough to put that idea to rest. For a while anyway.


Warmer today. Breakfast, late, very late, after some work is done late, on the porch...





...Where the robin has come back and removed the twigs she had used to start a nest. That’s one bird invested in her building materials!

Isis gets his dish of milk. Satisfied, he picks a choice spot in the flower bed and dozes off.





I have got to stop spending all spare dollars on perennials.

Even as it is an irresistible thing: so many spaces begging (in my mind) for flowers! So close (maybe five miles) to the Midwest’s most wonderful perennial greenhouse (The Flower Factory)! And the drive there is utterly lovely.





We arrive just as a bus is loading up -- passengers and trays of flowers. Members of the Quad City Botanical Club (based in Davenport, Iowa) are down here for the morning.  I don't blame them. I'd travel this far for good flowers.

I add some favorite performers – penstemon, coreopsis, lupinus.

At the farmette, I dig out (with my hand – you can better feel the roots that way) lots of weeds. Then put in the new guys.






The rhubarb is spilling onto the path to the farmhouse. I mean, really spilling over. Whatever am I going to do with all the rhubarb? No, don’t say pie. No pie.





Ed gets on his John Deere. The grass is seeding, it is that tall. Ed gets off his Deere. Blade issues. Engine issues. He works on fixing one thing, then another. I use the standard mower to get to places that a Deere can’t get to.





Isis is here now, in the farmhouse. Begged his way in for a short while. I want to know – how do you ask a cat to leave when he lets you know with his whole being that he loves being near you? Darn animal. What’s the exit strategy here anyway?


At the café this afternoon, I read papers. The sun is out, but I read papers.

Is there a pattern to my days right now? No, I don’t think so.

exclusion

One chance flutter and I think the porch project – my top priority porch project, the one that was to give us days of outdoor life in the heavily buggy months of July and August, has bitten the dust.

I wake up to a drizzle. Fine. I had a beautiful day yesterday, time for the rains now – good for the earth, good for my work, too.

And still, it is a lovely, dreamy world out there. I look out the kitchen/dining window, past the porch. The lilacs are gently arched, dripping lightly on the flowers below. In the background, the crab apple is a glorious fanfare of blossoms.





Then, the flutter. I look up at the porch eaves. There’s an old nest up there. Is it being revamped? No – you’ll notice this about birds and wasps – they like the fresh and honest. They’ll build their own rather than move into something already there.

But a few feet away, in one of the free corners, a robin is at it. Building.





Oh dear. If there is one thing I know about my landlord is that he will not exclude animal life to make his own world (or mine) more comfortable. Screening the porch while a robin is nesting there? It won’t happen.

Of course, my landlord is also frugal. He dislikes waste and unnecessary acquisitions. Perhaps I should stay quiet and wait until he purchases the nonrefundable screening materials...

Nah. He’ll just hold off building anything until next year. Or the year after. Or whenever robins quit mounting nests in the eaves of the porch.


LATER:

But as the morning progresses, I notice that the robin has abandoned construction. As if the mortgage was denied after all. A robin nest foreclosure? What happened?

I open the front door. Isis is poking around. Good old mice chasing Isis, who just two days ago left half a critter for us to admire on the wood chipped path.

And there you have it. Now that there are people in the farmhouse and a cat lurking, the porch eave values may have plummeted for the robins out there.

Cats, mice, robins, people. You help one, you kick out the other. Sad how that works.

bright and beautiful

A painfully beautiful day! You could not improve upon it, even as you understand that it is so very rare tp have this confluence of goodness and so you must make great use of it. You have a morning, a noon hour and an evening and then, like a vacation, it will be a thing of the past, leaving you with memories, nothing more.

It is a good thing that I am still waiting to get printouts of exams because it would be very difficult to stay indoors on this superb day.

Morning.  I do as it seems I do every day now. I check for mice (nothing!) and I walk the land.





I note things that need attention and I mull over whether it is better to concentrate on getting a small portion of the land very very right, or a large portion right in small incremental ways. Mostly I do the former: work hard on small areas. But these don't need my attention right now. And so my working sights branch out.





Funny I should mention branches, because much of the work today consists of cutting away dead branches – large and small.

There are the healthy trees with spent branches and then there are the trees that appear quite spent themselves. We have, in fact, a whole dead tree that, according to me, should have come down some years ago, except even this is difficult for Ed (we’re taking away the perfect woodpecker home!). And there are a number of box elders that really should come down as well, but you could spend a whole summer on that project and still be left with a lot of pruning at the end of it all. So we leave alone the big issues and concentrate on the manageable ones.

Did I mention how beautiful this day is? What with the blue sky and the fruit trees nearing their blossoming peak? Breakfast is on the porch. How could it be otherwise! Isis joins us.





In the afternoon we move some ant hills away from the house (that’s a cross your fingers kind of project) and then we bike to our most favorite café. It’s a twenty minute ride and I think how this is the amount of time it took me to bike from the condo to work.

And I am not done with the outdoors yet! In the early evening, I mow down clumps of weeds around the fruit trees and the willow.

I’m spent. How the bees keep on going, hour after hour is beyond me. Hats off to you guys.





In a rare move, Ed and I take the motorcycle to town for dinner. Such a night! Chock full of good warm air. No freeze warning either. Perfect, from morning 'til tomorrow morning.

p.s.

I step outside and consider the risk. Cover all the scattered vegetables, herbs, baby perennials and annuals?

The moon is bright, the air is crisp. A beautiful night, actually.





I'm going to bet on a frost free night tonight. Weather forecasters -- they've been wrong plenty of times, right? Good night moon, good night mice.

learning to love the challenge

I tell Ed, as we mull over ideas for the porch – this will be the last big project for the farmhouse! He looks at me and shakes his head. No, the farmhouse is going to be an ongoing project.

He’s right, of course. The mouse didn’t come back last night, but so what. We know there is the rotted wood which, until replaced, provides quite the welcome mat for this little rodent and others like him. I plug the existent holes with twigs. Ed laughs. And there are other potential entryways, more difficult to fix. We'll keep the mouse trap thing going for a long time still. There will be mice.


I could list in this way any number of big and small issues that we'll want to address.

Oh, why not – let me just mention a small one: The floors. The chairs are scraping hard against the newly finished floors. Yes, we know about chair pads. Utter failures, all. Yesterday, Ed made little terry cloth booties for the chair legs, holding them up snugly by O rings. Cute and functional. Tiny problem temporarily solved.

One big ongoing project is the management of the three acres of land surrounding the farmhouse. So far, we’re attacking things as whimsy strikes us. It’s more fun that way. And we’re making rapid progress in some areas – there are, for example, the perennial borders I’m creating in spaces near the farmhouse.

 


But it’s slow going elsewhere (meaning the remaining 95% of the property).

Still, we’re doing good work. Stiff limbs afterwards kind of work. And let me remind you of the beauty of waking up to a sunny May day at a farmhouse. One flight of stairs and I’m outside.






I note that the truck farmers are already working the fields (this photo was shot at 7:15).





Farm people are up early. 7:15 is not early.



On the agenda for today: I have one last reason to go to the condo – the sale of a table that I left behind there.


Okay, it's done.  It may well be that I’ll not ever go back to the condo again. I don’t mull over that one for too long. Immigrants (and I am one) learn quickly not to mull over change until several years separate them from any particular transition (then they mull aplenty, as I do: yes, all past upheavals get a decent airing. Years later).

One more stop at a plant store to pick up a handful of perennials. More planting – there’s always more planting to do at the farmette.

Evening. Oh-oh.  I read that there is a frost warning for tonight.

Really? I’m glad we’re only playing at working the land. And that Ed has many dirty quilts and blankets to place outside.

Ufff....

atonement

Let me pick up where I left off last evening. You remember -- when Ed was sleeping on the floor and I announced that the trap had a mouse.

Ed dutifully takes the mouse up the road. He has been jolted out of a deep sleep and now is settling back to a restful position when I say again – Ed, we have another mouse.

And suddenly, the prospects seemed daunting. What if we have a huge family of mice stopping by? Are we in for nights of catch and release? Sigh...

Ed digs out a large plastic bin and slips the mouse into it for the night. He’ll take it further out tomorrow. I look at the mouse – that is one huge rodent! And she’s eaten all the peanut butter. Of course. First they eat, then they look around for an escape route.

It’s one o’clock. Do you know where you mice are?

And here’s an interesting fact: we have no more mice this night.

Could it be that we HAVE been trapping and releasing the same mouse or two? How far is their range? If you go on the Internet, you get yourself an evening’s worth of readings on other people’s experiences with mice. There are a lot of people out there and a lot of mice. Not surprisingly, they clash. People have a lot of ideas on how to prevent that from happening ever again.


Sunday. We talk about mouse proofing the farmhouse, but it is a daunting task. If you saw how the stone foundation interfaced with the rest of the structure, you’d know that there are perhaps a hundred places where mice could chew and enter the building.

We put it all aside for now. The wind is blowing the clouds apart. It's turning out to be a cool but fine day. Astonishingly green, with dabs of blooming color.





I clean the farmhouse, we stop for a coffee break and then I go down to the condo, to do a final cleaning before I hand over the keys to the next owner.

Between the farmhouse and the condo, I spend six hours on cleaning today. And if you add an after dinner clean up – we’re up to seven.

I cannot say that I enjoy cleaning much of anything, but I especially have a hard time cleaning the condo when I'm no longer there. Of course, you could tell me that I do not have to do this. The buyer is paying significantly less than the listing price, so you could say that distributive justice demands that I hand over a dusty mess,

But I can’t. I feel that I have been so lucky in life and so much of what could have gone wrong, did not, that I ought to now think not about the low selling price, but instead about how to make this transition smooth for the buyer and for me.

And so I clean. Hard and long.


The sun is fading. It's evening at the farmhouse. The light is lovely right now, showing off even the simplest flowers by the entrance door.


 


The mouse trap is ready again.Though it surely would be nice if no mouse came by to visit us tonight.

stuff of memories

Law School graduation today. I remember my own, 32 [correction: 24! what was I thinking...] years ago. My tiny girls were there. I worried that they would last the evening and think it at least a little fun. I was proud, but not nearly as proud as when they then both went through their own law school graduations.

Today I could sit back and close my eyes (insofar as on the stage you can actually sit back and close your eyes) and think about how important these memories really are.

...At the same time that new memories form, nonstop. My older daughter, the one who was just six when I got my law degree, is now on the stage with me, congratulating graduating students – whew! And my littlest one, the girl who was just barely two when I graduated – she's now herself lawyering away in Chicago – oh my, memories are strong during the days of spring rituals and milestones.


And they’re strong at the farmhouse as well. It is such a cold and wet day – the worst of May weather, the stuff you have to put up with in the upper Midwest even as you count the minutes until it all passes and the sun comes out again.

But wait. It’s the middle of May. Aren’t the lilacs blooming yet?

They are.





Is there a person alive (I’m thinking in Madison or Poland) who does not have significant lilac memories?

My own – oh, there are so many! The earliest belong to my grandmother’s village house in Poland. Those purple and white fistfuls of buds! My grandmother would snip off twigs with the richest blooms and wrap them in newspaper – for us to take back to Warsaw when we left after a week-end visit.

That lilac smell! Lilacs and lilies of the valley. No set of fragrances could be more evocative. Unless it's the violets, sold on Warsaw street corners -- dainty little bouquets, tightly pulled together with a rubber band, stems decoratively wrapped with a strip of foil.

So, now the lilacs are starting their bloom at the farmhouse. I can’t take credit for planting them – so much around me is old. The bushes are big and strong and someone out there is probably carrying memories of their bloom with them.



And on the mouse front, you ask, how goes it there? Well, Isis still comes in for the occasional brief visit..





And, too, there's this: it's Saturday evening. Ed has fallen asleep on the floor, I'm working away. Then -- click. Click, click. And more violently -- click, click!

Ed, please wake up. We've caught a mouse. The trap's just around the corner. A mere six feet away.

It's raining.

Ed, a sleepy Ed,  is coming in from the release. I take out the old jar of peanut butter and scrape it, to lay a tad into the trap.

How about a little bit less? We're trying to trap it, not feed it, Ed comments.

The night is young. The trap is set again. A commenter wrote a minute ago -- you are aware, of course, that it is the same mouse? 
No, we've had at least two: one was a lightweight, one a clunker. And last night, the trap closed without a mouse to show for it. Tonight? A returnee? I don't know... There are so many mice out there... So many mice...

spring forward?

Is it that hope springs eternal or spring springs eternal or both spring eternally and ever after?





The mice disappear for now. I’m sure they’ll be back, but for now we have a day of quiet.

The warm air disappears as well. It’s cold and wet outside.

Blogger disappeared for a long stretch too, but for me, it comes back up. For me, but not for others. I don’t get it. Perhaps it’s just a passing thing.

In the meantime, despite it all, the fruit trees and the lilacs continue to push toward the time when they set my spring world on fire. Here we go, almost there...