returning home

Leaving Chicago. During morning rush hour.

Does anyone ever just sit there and take in the world? Or are we all hell bent on reading the latest text, twitter or email the minute it gets posted?





We are engaged in our own bubble. I say this as I put those pods in my own ears and spend the next three hours listening to songs that have nothing to do with where I am and where I’m going.


So now I am home. Hi, Wisconsin.

In the late afternoon, I meet my good good friend (and for a fleeting second, her daughter) at a new place in town (or at least new for me). I can absorbe the joy of living in a small(er) town. The décor is homey.





They still take the time to decorate the lattes.





And the news crew is on the premises, collecting opinions as to whether we should have a study done on whether to make a one way street into a two way street.





I think about my two great friends from student law school days. We all have daughters. Who are in many ways so different. Yet, they, all four of them, have this in common – a passion for superb, fresh and honest food.

Odd, in a sweet, sweet sort of way.

8-1-11

Happy 30th birthday, little one.

A sizzling, muggy day in the city. What I can’t understand is why my daughters chose such extremes for their birth days: one picking the coldest day of the century for coming into this world, the other – an intense heat wave.

It’s a good thing that I get a kick out of extremes. [Yes, Ed, that means I am also amused by your dedication to the idea that an old ripped t-shirt constitutes suitable apparel, and I find a car – my own – with a masking tape for a fender to be kind of cool.]

The kind of day where half the city likes to head for the beach. If there is a beach. Chicago has a beach and a bus that’ll take you there. It's one crowded bus today, picking up half scantly clad young bodies at it rolls east.










My younger girl has a full work day and my older girl is spending the morning hours with her dad. This gives me a good bit of time to write and I do this in an old coffee shop and bakery with a proprietor whose name is Elzbieta. The Polish language in Chicago is still ever present.

In the early afternoon, I make my way to the south of the Loop.





Since it is my older girl's day,  I tell her she can pick and choose our afternoon and evening itinerary.

She chooses whales.





She’s an avid museum goer, especially if there’s an educational exhibit, preferably about history or about animals.

And so we cool off by studying skeletal structures and annotated photographs of whales.

It is a very refreshing way to spend a day that sizzles.

We do challenge ourselves to a hike across town and we make our way from the south of Chicago to the north, way north, past the Loop, the Golden Mile, all the way to the Rush Street area. It’s warm enough that I do not even mind a cooling moment (with a blueberry smoothie -- gotta love those blueberries!) at a mall.

I look up and see my girl coming down the escalator and I think -- life is so good when your kids are happy.





And now, onto the Purple Pig where the two of us wait for the little one to join us for delicious small nibbles accompanied by a cooling Prossecco.

Finally, a birthday hug.





Evening’s young. Time to join the rest of family and friends, up in Andersonville at the Italian favorite, Anteprima.







One more photo. It's her day and so I pepper the post with her photos. But it's my day too, and so the last is of the two of us.





After, riding the bus back to my littler one’s apartment, I listen to ipod music and I lean on the shoulder of my daughter and I think how deliciously wonderful it is to have these interesting kids, adult kids, good and kind souls who don’t mind having a mom occasionally lean on them, with white ipod wires dangling from her ears.

Sunday steps

Last night, after a family-plus-Ed evening meal at Graze (when does an occasional traveling companion and permanent landlord become “family”?) my daughters ambled toward the lake and Ed and I motorbiked to the farmhouse, As if wanting more of a summer night, Ed reached for the “best Dutch movie ever” (borrowed from the library) and slipped it just before midnight into the DVD player.

And even though it was Dutch and with subtitles and on a tiny TV, we were riveted.  And surprised at how long the movie was. By 2:30 it came to a climatic ending, but we hadn’t had enough and so we watched a good portion all over again, with a voice-over of the director’s comments.

And so it would have been wonderful to sleep in beyond the usual early farmhouse hours the next morning, except we couldn't do it – not with the sunlight pouring in through the eastern skylight. We need a shade – Ed tells me.

We motorbike over to Shopko for a pair of tension rods, past fields of market crops and meadows of prairie flowers.





There is a sale of very sad looking end-of-season plants at Shopko and we rescue them, as many as we can fit for the ride back to the farmhouse. Curtain rods, white pines, black eyed Susans, shrubs without names – some now on my lap, others snugly tucked in the crate in back of the motorbike.

And so we have a busy morning.

My daughters came for a porch brunch – oyster mushroom and corn frittata – and you could say it is a celebratory brunch, or at least a pre-celebratory brunch because tomorrow, my older girl turns thirty. We believe in dragging out  celebrations for as long as we can.










She had tossed around a number of ways to migrate jubilantly into life's fourth decade and in the end decided to go down for the big day itself to Chicago, where she has both family and friends. We eat our eggs and yesterday's ice cream too and then we all pile into the bus that takes us down to the city that is just a short three hours south of the farmette.


And so now  it is Sunday evening and we are in Chicago – an urban break for me...


 


...one that feels good, so good, eating dinner in the golden light of a perfect summer evening...


 



...a perfect city summer evening, all the more perfect because I know that in a day or so, I'll be returning to the quiet of the fields and meadows that I have surrounding me back home at the farmette.

returning

A friend said – don’t go downtown if you want apricots. The restaurants will have snapped them up. Come back to the West Side Community Farmers Market.

And so we did. It was like visiting old friends.





But there weren't any apricots. "Linda" there told us – come earlier next week. Much earlier.






So we continue today:  on to the downtown market. Not to buy necessarily. We’d done that, at the Westside market.


 



But there are vendor friends to see downtown...





... foods, too, to admire.






...and  daughters love the downtown market, and I have both of them in Madison on this day.







In the late afternoon. I unpack the new ice cream maker and we make strawberry Greek yogurt ice-cream.





Summer continues.

summer, continued

It is remarkable how you can pick up life where you left it. Summer bliss, sunny days, bike rides and flower photos, continued. As if for a while, I had taken an unfamiliar path and was told to go back and resume on the main road.





And it is one heck of a nice main road.

I had mostly stopped work on my book during the last two weeks. When I tried to pick it up, it felt like I was pushing it forward to beat some dreadful deadline: hurry up, or you’ll be one of those cases where it goes to a publishing house posthumously. And then they’ll reject it and your kids will suffer terribly because they had hoped, they had really hoped that you had the talent and they could take pride in seeing your belated success.

So I didn’t write at all.

But today was easy. On the porch. Sometimes with Isis there, though he had momentarily fallen out of favor with me as he chose, sometime this morning, to regurgitate his food up on the table, on my pretty little cloth from the Basque region of Southern France. Ed said he would clean it up, but there are reasons why I never trust him to such tasks. He does a very incomplete job.

Still, the day proceeds beautifully. Writing is a breeze, a bike ride is delightful...





...a café moment – peaceful and satisfying.

Biking to the café, I paused to admire the truck farmers across the road. One was snipping flowers and she was so delightfully ensconced in the flower bed...





...that I got off the bike to get a closer shot.





She said – for you, I give these for you.

I haven’t money with me. Maybe later?

Go home later.

Tomorrow?

Oshkosh tomorrow. Market in Oshkosh. Here, for you, these for you.

I can’t take them!

Here. I add some here, too. And she adds beautiful fragrant trumpet lilies and it’s all so gorgeous!


 

Thank you.

Ed and I pedal back home and I come back to her out in the field, with a cold drink and a $5 bill.
She likes the water but is offended by the cash.
You know man there? She points to the house just across from where she is standing. I give him some too. He has cancer. Maybe be happy.

People are so generous. Really, at their core, people are so generous and so often, the less they have, the more they want to give.

I put the flowers on the table. It is a day of flowers. And good people. And not having to cook dinner because friends are doing it for me tonight. Too lucky. Just too lucky.

this day

A night of storms

It flashed and rumbled all night long. Some time early in the night the power went off and my bedside clock went into perpetual flashing midnight mode. Too sleepy to fix it, I left it alone and so I had a "Groundhog Day" night of waking up to thunder again and again, as the clock flashed midnight.

Eventually daylight made the midnight reading completely absurd and I reached over to set the thing straight.

Oddly, it felt very still after the storms. And muggy. Isn’t it supposed to work exactly in the other direction? Where is the whiff of cleansed air, the fresh smell of pine and clover and phlox? It smelled more like mushrooms – not unpleasant and not unusual, given the truckloads of woodchips we have down here, at the farmette, but I was looking for something more... sweet and crisp.

Equanimity

I need to get off the couch and get going... I tell Ed. We are both with our laptops, Isis is curled between us. You have never seen such a contented look on an animal’s face.
No, no. Relax. This is why people with pets live longer – they don’t rush. They settle in with their animal and let go. Equanimity.

People who sit all day on a couch do not live longer, cat or no cat.

For an hour. Just let it go.

Things are not what they seem

Let go? Yes, it’s easy now.

The week had been so challenging and one’s inclination is to feel bummed during such times, especially after the doctor tells you you probably have cancer. Even if everyone reassures you that 'most likely' it wont kill you. Still, you shift perspectives. For example, I stopped making plans for the month before me. Or beyond.

But this morning, I got the message that blew me away. I mean, I was adjusting to the 'one day at a time' routine and then I get the words: you’re clean. Things are not what they appeared to be. Like, you’re looking at flowers, they look like lavender fields, they should be lavender fields and then they turn out to not be lavender fields at all.





So, it appears I’m not a lavender field.

I didn’t think I’d get off lightly this time. There are reasons why I could be sick. If you were playing Clue, you’d figure it out: it was the dentist, with a machine, in his Fifth Avenue office that did it. When I came to the States as a kid I had Eastern European post-war teeth. Someone recommended a dentist on Fifth, off of Washington Square. I went to him twice a week my entire first year in New York. He x-rayed everything, every time. Before and after. Like a horrific photo display of his talents. I must have had that machine pointing at my head and neck fifty times that year.

But, right now, I’m clean.

I do have to join a club of irradiated children with thyroids that tick loudly and glow in rage,  and there are decisions to be made in the years ahead, but so far, so good. I tell Ed: it was the blueberries. He grunts. You can’t make an antioxidant believer out of a guy who still extols the virtues of ramen noodles. (Cheap.)

You didn’t use raspberries for breakfast this morning, Ed chides me.

Well sorry, I was concentrating on other stuff.

Like what?

Arranging my affairs, so to speak.

People said I didn't look worried. Yep, I’m excellent at ignoring the negatives. Sometimes that’s a good thing.
I had to pick my own raspberries.

Poor you! Oh fine, I’m going out to harvest the rest. It may rain later.

I’ll help.

Great antioxidants...

The Show

Neither of us is hungry. The coffee break, with a pb&j quickly slapped together, came rather late in the day. But, the cloudy skies notwithstanding, it’s such a pleasant evening! A summer evening, of warm winds and warm feelings.
Let me grill, I say to Ed. We can eat on the porch and watch the bats over our chicken brats with sauerkraut. And corn. It is the time for corn. And peapods and tomatoes. A good time.

waiting

...for the skies to clear. My sympathies go out to the people of Oregon and Washington. I understand you have many days that are like ours today: gray.

And I’d like to remind everyone that I was not the one complaining about the warm weather. So if we can have some of that back as well, I’d be grateful.

The day is on hold. The week is on hold. The month is on hold.

But, there were at least four good moments:

First, the girl that was in the ER room yesterday after a car ran into her, came by today. Despite a bruised shoulder and an immobilized elbow, she was as smiling and bouncy as ever.





Secondly: I cleaned the farmhouse. Top to bottom. Ed would find that a curious reason to feel accomplished and yet I do.

Thirdly: Ed said today – I didn’t think it would be this much fun having you live at the farmhouse. Emphasis on the word “this.” You have to know him to understand that it was a very sweet comment.

Fourthly (but not lastly): I sure have had a lot of nice emails, phone calls and comments. Thanks for those! The world doesn’t feel that upside down.





I’m just waiting for that streak of sunshine.

it could have been so much worse

Honestly, you just have to laugh at some days HA HA HA! Okay? Now can I complain?

I wasn’t going to. I was saving it for the day when I really had a bad run of it. Something awful and heart wrenching that had no silver lining, none whatsoever. But, I’m up for a bit of tension release. So bear with me. (There is no bad ending, in fact, there is no ending at all, so sit back and laugh with me.)

I had a procedure scheduled for this morning. Savvy people know what that’s all about. You get a test, the test reveals something. In my case, a suspected cancer. I can go on about the months where I struggled with the age old question – is it in my mind, or am I feeling a bit ... odd?

So when the test said suspected bla bla bla, I read the stats and thought – well now, either I’ll be cured or the gig is up. No more travel to Sorede. I mean, how piggish of you to want a third time.

I have to insert something here: I have had, in my life, at least three catastrophic life threatening diseases. So bracing for another isn’t so... well, strange for me.

I went in for the biopsy today. I thought to myself – if nothing good comes of it, I will have at least trained a new young doctor on how to do this well: guide that needle flawlessly, scoop the crap out and retreat. She tried, under the supervision of a senior presiding bla bla. Sometimes she did okay. Other times? Well, it was an education. I support our teaching institutions, including the UW Hospitals and Clinics. I give up my body for the pedagogical mission.

So now I need to wait for a great number of days. Fair enough. If I have a good outcome, I will surely let you know. If not – well then, maybe. Depends.

My daughter, the one who lives in Madison, had taken me to the hospital. I told her that she needn’t do that. That this is why older people date and eventually have traveling companions – to spare their children of visits to the doctor with their aging parent. But, she insisted and so we went. I think she got a lot of work done at the hospital as 1. They botched the paperwork and so it took forever to straighten out what procedure was to be done and 2. There is really nothing else that’s amusing in the hospital and so you do what you can – your work, if that’s all you have with you.

After, we went to the grocery store and then she went her way and I went mine. Meaning, I called my companion who came to the store and motorbike me home. Question: if I am too sedated to be released from the hospital to drive myself home, is it okay to release me to the back seat of a motorbike? I mean, arguably, I could swing right out of that seat, because the world seems so wobbly and uncomplicated when you’re on drugs.


I am at the farmhouse. I am unpacking the groceries. I am on the last item in the grocery bag when the phone rings. Strange number. I pick it up anyway.
Mommy... I got hit by a car while biking... please come.

The nightmare call. What, what the strange number? What happened? Is she bleeding? Is it that kind of message?

I take Ed’s car (because in crises, I am superb. I think straight and I do what needs to be done: take the car with the bike rack; you know that at the end of the day, you’ll have to take the wrecked bike home...). I speed. Or, I try. The cell phone rings again.
Mommy, they want to know if you’re coming... there’s an ambulance waiting.

Fucking shit. There. I can curse.

I speed, hoping for a police escort. No escort. Near the Capitol Square, I see the police, the commotion. I put my fist to the horn (mind you, it is a weak horn: we’re talking about Ed’s Geo ’93) and pull up to where she is.

She’s on her feet. That’s good. She had sent the ambulance away. Another good sing. She is bruised and shaking and there are bones that need to be xrayed and wounds that need cleaning and if we were super nice people we’d appease the guy who ran her down – he is terribly sad that this had happened and indeed he offers to buy us a drink to compensate. We say no thank you.


I had spent the morning at UW hospitals and the afternoon at Meriter ER room and all in all, I arrived back at the farmhouse this evening rather... depleted.

But, I look in on the purchased groceries and see that I have enough for a salad, a Sorede type salad of potatoes and eggs and tomatoes and beans and oh so many other wonderful summer things.





So I make that and Ed and I eat, as my daughter recoups at her home; and now we’re finishing cleaning the stained windows and soon we’ll watch the bat show and really, I can’t worry about anything else, because it’s just such a beautiful evening right now.

on this day

You had a friend over, Ed tells me.

You had a friend over too.

Coincidence: I had mine, he had his and it all sort of blended into one harmonious whole.


It was a perfect summer day and I remembered the deal I had made with myself back in February: on a perfect summer day, I will finish staining the new window frames at the farmhouse. And so Ed took out the nine new windows and I set up shop on the porch, staining and sealing.

You know what’s really strange in an exhilarating sort of way? All the upstairs windows of the farmhouse (and some downstairs) are out for at least today and tomorrow. It’s as if we are in a house without walls: the winds blow from one end to the next and it all feels sort of fragile.

I also wrote work letters and attended to emails. I felt it was the day to get things done.

You’ve seen photos of meals on the porch. Brunch, grilling dinners, breakfasts. I’ll complete the set today. Here’s lunch.





A throw together meal of sliced tomatoes and basil and picholine olive oil from Languedoc. And cheeses and rhubarb. Even peanut butter. Of grape juice and lemon fizzy water and salty chocolate from Minneapolis. And shots of espresso. To help my freind drive the long way back to the Twin Cities.


There is a tomorrow and there is the next day. After that? We’ll see. It will be different, for sure. Or, if I’m lucky, it’ll be the same.

Sunday in the country

I’m up early. Not by my standards, but by yours: isn’t Sunday supposed to be the day the sun eventually coaxes you up and out of bed?

Eh, there was no sun.

So we picked berries for breakfast (and then some). Might as well plunk a friend into the cane jungle too. Experience farm living from all its scratchy sides.

Breakfast on the porch. Cereals, breads, fruits. Toasted bagels. Acacia honey.





What is acacia – someone asks. Ah, in Poland, Acacia is what allows little girls to decide if “he loves me” or “he loves me not.” It goes like that: he loves me, he likes me, he respects me, he doesn’t want me, he doesn’t care, he’s messing with me, I’m in his thoughts, I’m in his words, I’m in his wedding plans. Except in Polish, it all rhymes.


Some people are very helpful putting out the foods. Other people are very good at sitting back and watching the world of early morning swallows.






My friends and I take a morning country walk. We want to veer off on the Nature Conservancy trail, but the path is so overgrown that some of us are buried to our necks in grasses. Others duck and dodge the singularly motivated deer flies. All of us decide to turn back and resume our walk along the country road. The prairie flowers are as beautiful from afar.





Really, it is like a canvas out there.





All that’s missing is a vineyard or two. Soon. We’re a state with an open mind.

sparks of light

What a treat: my two law school days best pals ever showed up at the farmhouse door this afternoon with their overnight bags and a willingness to (mostly) sit on the porch and talk for a good many hours.

Oh, it wasn’t all that spontaneous: when one lives in the Twin Cities and the other travels even greater distances, you need a bit of coordination.

Still, it was a terrific evening and the bats performed right on schedule and the fireflies continued even longer, though their light became muted and interspersed with the light of stars and somewhere, lightening flashes.

Is it heat lightening? One friend asked.
What exactly is heat lightening?
Don’t know, but wouldn’t you think it is just this, on a hot summer night?

A hot summer night. Yes, and a hot day too, though not so hot as to make the flowers wilt. I should know: we see rows and rows of them growing in the fields across the road. Like lavender fields only not lavender at all, but beautiful to pause by on the bike ride home from the Café.





That’s all for today. Think flowery thoughts and if you're still up now, at midnight,  poke your head outside just in case there may be fireflies and stars in your backyard too.

the day after

It can’t be that time passes without mishap. I’ve not known it to proceed that way, ever. I was so very aware of that on our last day on La Franqui beach near Sorede in France, when I stayed in the sea water and stayed some more, thinking that if I leave it – this moment of bliss, the time of bubbles and  perfection will be a thing of the past and life will take over in its normal way again. With bumps and bruises. I remember noting here, on Ocean, that you must learn to love non-bliss to stay happy.

So I’m getting a handful of bumps – it is to be expected after all. I’ll mention them more if they become major stumbles. Mere bumps don’t deserve Ocean time. I am, however, surprised at how easy it is to maintain calm, to strategize with new factors in place. I think getting older is a great thing – the drama is really muted. Calm is easier to attain.

So, let me tell you about some of the high points from this day: first, the beautiful bike ride to the Oasis Café. Did I mention that if you are ever so watchful, you can, for a fleeting second, catch a glimpse of this? And by this, I mean a view of our Capitol, introduced by a field of corn. Wisconsin, I do love you so!





At the Oasis, I met up with an old friend of Ed’s. She gave me his photos from years back – a treat, since Ed keeps no photos and I have no visuals to help me construct the story of his years before he knew me.

I looked at the photos afterwards and I thought – man oh man, this is not the guy I know now. He has this roguish strut there that I recognize, only now it is tempered and weathered, so that it is almost always accompanied by a smile. As if time has mellowed the need to be sharply defiant.

I pedaled back and was reflecting on all this when a creepy guy in a car pulled over to the wrong side of the road. When I glanced at him – to see what he was up to and to figure out a way that I could circumvent his presence, he spat out some nasty sounds. I hoped he was on a cell phone and that they weren’t directed at me, but I guess they were, because he then sprung forward in his car, passed me, shouting obscenities and throwing something (a branch? ) at me. He missed, but I thought – Jesus, there are a lot of creepy people in this world.

Up our road, the road that leads to the farmette – I finally paused to take one out of the two photos that I have wanted to take for a while (the other will follow, not today, but soon). I want to spotlight it because you should know that almost just across the road, every single day of this summer, whether biking or driving, I can look over my shoulder and see this:





So perhaps that is why I can be calm. And quite happy.

looking for small pleasures

I said to Ed today – I think great chunks of my book are not turning out the way I want. The excitement just isn’t there.

I think I’m too much in a hurry. I have the summer and then I have teaching again and I know I will not find the time then to write. My head will be swimming with to-do lists and appointments and meetings and all the hoopla that accompanies full days on campus.

I admit, it’s been a challenging day. By the end of it, after at least a few pleasant minutes at the Fitchburg farmers market -- wonderful La Baguette bread, peas and pea pods at another stand, elsewhere -- cheese, as explained by a father to his son...















...and after some more pleasant minutes at the Oasis Café, Ed and I pedal home. There, he mumbles something about feeding the cat and disappeares into his shed for a good many hours. I felt badly for him – he did not bargain for the tougher times of traveling occasionally with a companion. It just sort of happened.