mothers and others

 

Well I hope you had a happy Mother’s Day – if you’re not a mother, then you are at least the kid of one and whether you are able to stay in touch, or wish you could, or didn’t give it that much thought – I still hope that there are some calm and joyous recollections that you have of that unique relationship between kid and mom.

 

You would think that I would be celebrating with my daughters today. Not so. We postponed it for later this week, for reasons that are completely inconsequential. In the meantime, I say to Ed – wish me a happy mother’s day! – and he does, with a notable absence of enthusiasm that is deliberate and childish and sometimes adorable.

Andy, our construction guy, the man who helped us rebuild the farmhouse last year, stopped by. We have a small project that we want to discuss with him. It’s like old times – Ed fires off construction questions and ideas, Andy, shakes his head – and still it all moves forward.  

 

Moving forward. In the garden too. One plant at a time.

We hunt for strawberries, buried under weeds – tall plants straining for light, without much hope, salvaged at the last moment, placed in the quirky bed of veggies and now fruits.

Flowers. They’re each taking their turn now!

They’re always framing the farmhouse for me. The entrance along the brick walkway is defined by what grows at the sides.

The entire house, even the still-light-beige-brown-whatever-off-color dormer, stands in a thicket of growing things.

It's always this way: I look up, see the farmhouse in a bed of greens and emergent blooms. I rush inside to grab the camera, not really caring that I’ve already taken this photo. Many times. And yet, I need another.

There are subtle changes! Flowers change. What I cut for the table changes too. Daffodils done, lilies of the valley – out. Lilac – I’m back with lilac, a late blooming variety.

And so, to that sweet smell of middle spring! And to you, moms of kids and kids of moms!

markets and rallies and who knows what else

To market, to market...but let’s skip the pig part. Though, just a couple of days ago, I did notice that our neighbor has this on his rooftop.

This is a somewhat distant neighbor, but he owns and rents much of the farmland to the west and south of us. He is selling his house and moving closer to town. This is the trouble with rural America: houses sprout close to the cultivated land (rather than, say, clustering close to the bakery) and this isolates families. Our neighbor complains that he and his wife have to shuttle the kids constantly to school, to extracurriculars, to friends. To be a parent is to be a chauffeur. May as well make the daily shuttles on the short side.

At the market, I buy the usual. My usual. Everyone has their usual. And we wouldn’t be Wisconsin if the usual did not include cheese, in some form or another.

In May, I search out the good asparagus, the oyster mushrooms, the strawberry plants. Loaded onto Rosie, for the trip home.

Home. Where work continues. Ed cleans out the barn so that he can retire one of his ancient vehicles there. It’s a long story for another day. 

Me, I plant. To you, it all may seem abundant already. But abundance is a funny thing -- it demands attention or else it withers and fades.

And then we break for a coffee at Paul’s and here’s the odd thing: as we leave, we see that there are motorcycles up and down the street. A flash mob! – Ed says. Actually, it’s a Facebook rendezvous of the Vintage Motorcycles of Dane County .

Ed’s ancient Honda with the milk carton stuck on the rear suddenly looks like it’s here for a reason. Guys come and stare at it, because staring at ancient bikes of others is what you do at these rallies. And of course, Ed eventually recognizes past acquaintances and now I'm lost in the midst of a bikers' gathering, surrounded by people in black leathers and bandanas and I'm thinking -- odd how a day can suddenly place you in the thick of the unexpected.

The remaining daylight hours are, of course, at the farmette. digging, weeding, digging, weeding.

...planting. Always planting.

Then, too, there is the incident with the bug. Ever have a bug fly into your ear? Deeply into your ear? It’s weird. Ed uses the vacuum to try to suck out the guy that's made it into mine. No photo there, but I assure you, it was a very strange set of minutes.

But these are the outlier events. Much more meaningful is the time spent standing perfectly still, holding a water hose. Aiming at the slumped transplants. Firming the soil around the last of the cheapie plants. And making sure that the pots keep the vibrant colors of the garden alive, even as one set of perennials fades and the next has yet to take hold.

Such a good day. No complaints. Really, no complaints at all.

cat on a hot steel roof

Hello, morning. Yes, from any vantage point, it is a beautiful time of day. A real show stopper.

But I cannot dawdle today. I have before me a grand swing through town, with many things to accomplish there.

The best part is the first stop – at the Arboretum, for a walk (a run?) with my daughter.

The worst part is everything else. When you don’t go in to the city very often, your checklist grows. And grows. Exchange this, pick up that, and that, stop over here, do that. Bleh!

I remember sitting at a café in Sorede (very southern tip of France) and thinking – man, that guy who’s making food deliveries here sure seems to enjoy his work! Going from one place to the next, carting in boxes of onions and carrots with stems still on them – he’s virtually singing as he unloads the truck. What’s so great about stop and go errands? Stop, start, stop, start – it’s numbing!

In the Sorede scene, I see the pleasurable elements: it's not just the unload, it's also the greeting, the pause for an espresso, a comment on this or the next thing, a salute to life.

My errands (after the lovely walk) have the stop and go but none of the warm elements that would give them meaning and vitality. Stop, get out, purchase, pick up, no greeting offered, none received. Onto the next one.

And then, finally, I’m done. Pulling into the driveway of the farmette, I exhale. Home.

In the evening we are out planting again. Tomatoes. Eight more go in, shade, no shade, so what – so they’ll produce a dozen fruits each instead of two dozen. Do the math! We have too many plants, too many seedlings, we should cross our fingers and hope for a small bounty!

And then we plant a flat of strawberries and they look so pretty and so oblivious to the fact that they’ll have to spend half the day in shade that we search the farmland for more berries (because there are indeed some old berries with new runners, smothered in weeds, needing a rescue) and we transplant those too and now we are satisfied because the peas are starting to climb, the lettuce leaves are almost ready, the tomatoes are perky and the strawberries – lovely to behold.

The bulk of our spring work is done. Orchard, flowers, veggies, berries – most everything is in place. (Except the tomatoes: dozens more of those... next year we’ll do less, Ed tells me, as if that helps us now.) Some of our plantings will thrive, others wont, we know that, we are not foolishly optimistic. But the stage is set. The new season begins. 

...make the garden grow

What a day, what a wonderfully bright, pungent with spring, beautiful, sunny day!

But we sleep in. At night, Isis was restless, Ed was tired after his bike ride and so I was the cat care person, down the stairs, up the stairs, coming Isis! Okay Isis! Ed was so deeply asleep that he almost didn’t wake to the loud crash of Isis being knocked off the bed by an overly generous sweep of a limb. Ed's limb. Isis knows to sleep on that side of the bed. I complain loudly when he wanders over.

But last night the cat fell off the bed and I felt sorry for him so I was a good caregiver. Coming Isis!

We ate a hurried breakfast. It’s a packed day for us. Tomorrow I pick up exams, but today I have a different agenda! 

 

Start putting in the tomatoes! (Two dozen today, many dozen more at another time)

...and plant the newly arrived variation on pink daylilies (goal: 24) and lavenders (goal: the entire 6).

The noon hour passes, the sun grows stronger.

Lee, our resident farmer, comes over to assess the land she’ll be planting. How is it? I ask her.

Lots of grass. She has a point. It will be several years before all the quack grass is tilled out of there.

What are you planting? - I ask.

Cucumbers! Big ones. Pickle cucumbers!

Ah.

She walks past our veggie plot. Her friend is with her and they have a rapid exchange in Hmong and there are small giggles mixed in as well and it doesn’t take much to understand that she is amused at our efforts. She looks up at the sky and shakes her head.

I know! Not enough sun.

You come pick my peas. No need to plant.

Too late. We're invested in our beds.

Revised count: planted today: 28 tomatoes,  20 daylilies, 6 lavenders and various miscellaneous cheapies acquired at a Shopko sale – not so much because the plants themselves were tempting, but because these commercially grown perennials look so bedraggled and listless that it’s like going to an animal shelter and saving a cat or dog from a fate far worse than coming home with you.

The sun has set, the birds have settled. We eat our summer supper, which so often is accompanied by a baguette from the Thursday market...

La Baguette

Ed asks me – do you ever finish planting?

And I answer truthfully – yes. When we stumble into summer I am done. For me, there is a time for work and a time for reaping the benefits of work. My interest in digging the land diminishes as the soil gets harder, dryer, less forgiving, when the failed plants can’t be revived, not this year anyway, when the bugs drive us nuts, when there are other ways to enjoy the heat of the day.

 But for now, we work. Everyone who cares about what the earth produces works now. Late into the evening, until the sun sets.

bright days

I leave my countrified existence and spend the day on campus. If you’re teaching faculty at our Law School, you’ll know why – we have a retreat today, a daylong conversation about where we’re heading and how best to get there. A productive discussion. These are challenging times for universities and professional schools within them.

But it does mean that all else has to be put on hold. For me, the “all else” is fairly inconsequential. I’m done with exam writing, I haven’t exams to grade yet. Limbo days. Suspended between what was before and what comes next.

...With this one day retreat squashed in there on a bright, puffy May day. Perfect for a bike ride to campus.

And now it’s evening at the farmette. Ed has left for his Wednesday bike ride, I’ve pulled a bunch of weeds and admired the lettuce growth (slow but sure) and, too, I’ve waved a broom at menacing chipmunks and paid homage to the dragon flies...

...all that and now I’m settled in for a night of wondering how I can ever love winter again when spring (especially as it begins its roll into summer) is so very perfect.

inside outside

...or helter skelter. Or rush and release. Or back and forth. Call it what you will, the day had no structure, no consistency, no backbone to it.

Maybe it’s because it started too early. Lanky guys with cigarettes dangling, shows up with the MG&E truck at 7:15, ready to dump wood chips. Weird wood chips. More like pine needles and old moldy branches. But, we’ll take what we can get. The farmette is one big wood chip hill. I found my thrill on blueberry hill, piled with chips from the mill, on that blueberry hill.

Was this one of the earlier farmsteads in the area? I ask Ed at breakfast.

Maybe. It’s on a hill. Farmhouses were built on hills.

Why do you suppose?

Because the soil is better down below? Or, because there’s the view...

Right now, we haven’t much of a view. The trees are too tall.

In fact, I’m not sure our veggie garden is getting enough sunlight. In the winter, it looked like we would have more than six hours on the patch, but things change, trees fill out, shade takes over.

We can move the veggies out by the orchard in the future... Ed comments. But what would we do with this plot of land?

Grow flowers! – I say to him, knowing damn well that it’s the answer he’d like not to hear. Even today, I stopped by the nursery to pick up “oranges and lemons”  and “raspberry truffle.” You sure do like flowers – he shakes his head.

In the afternoon I go back to my school stuff. I have to. And that’s okay – these are good work demands. For a brief hour or two, I meet with dedicated students, at Paul’s. To answer questions about the semester's materials. In biking there and back, I note that the weedy but ever beautiful phlox is up and running.

Funny how sometimes you have to remember what's merely a weed and what's a beautiful flower.

In the evening, Ed takes me out to dinner.  At Sardine, for the happy hour special (oysters at 50%, glasses of wine at 50%, and then we share a plate of mussels).

We don’t let it end there. The sun is nearly set as, after dinner,  we walk along the road, toward the fields adjacent to the south, to the west... Ed talks to Lee, the woman who seems to single handedly cultivate the land here.
Will you be planting our acre? He asks.
It is not an acre. She’s right, it’s less than that. For what? She wants to know the cost involved.

For fruits and vegetables.
How many?
Just for us. She smiles. We shake hands, she drives off.

There is a beautiful sunset as we make our way across fields and marshes, dry now in this early season. I know, a photo would be appropriate. I did take out my phone and to snap one and then another, but they're not worth downloading here...

Not everything needs to be commemorated with a photo.

beds

But wait a minute – aren’t summers free from teaching supposed to have me make progress on my writing project (aka the book)?

Well yes, but I wont return to it until my exams are written and graded and that’s several weeks before me. My classes are not small.

In the meantime, Ed and I continue to work the land.

Four years ago, I created a flower bed by the path to the sheep shed.

Three years ago, I started work on the flower bed by the path to the farmhouse door.

Two years ago, we weeded and I planted the flower bed at the “front” of the farmhouse.

Last year we began work on the huge bed to the west.

And this year we’re at it again – besides the so far fantastically successful orchard, with our 13 trees and 11 blueberries, and besides the veggie patch out front, we’re adding a flower bed to the east.

For Ed, it’s not about creating beds. His goal is to cut back on the “lawn,” which is hardly a lawn – rather, a mixture of grasses and weeds. And so he whips...

 

...and he moves and removes boulders, old railroad ties...

 

...and he piles on the chips, taking free truckloads from anyone who is in the business of shredding trees. (Our latest contributor: Madison Gas & Electric.) Conventional wisdom has it that woodchips take away nitrogen from the soil, but we’ve had such tremendous success with shredded wood that Ed is convinced that the CW is too conventional and with not a lot of wisdom to it. There’s much to the process of wood chip decomposition, spore creation, etc etc, that is so complicated that it’s rather like trying to understand the economy – anyone’s guess is good until proven wrong.

The days of planting and tending are magnificent in May. By mid June, bugs start to be a nuisance, but for now, it’s just us and the butterflies. And Isis. 

He follows us as we lift and shovel and fill and occasionally Ed will say – he’s happy, he has a good life here and I agree and we both know that these comments are only in part about the cat. 

raining like cats and...

Waking up to thunder and a downpour. That’s okay, Sunday morning is farmhouse cleaning time. And though I’m not a fan of cleaning (who is...), I’m a fan of clean, so that when the place sparkles, I am happy.

This morning, therefore, I am made happy.

And then it’s a cat and mouse game. The rain stops. Outside, everything is wet, bountiful, saturated. (Ed tells me he has never seen the pear tree leaves so shiny, the fruits so plentiful...)





I spend a profitable hour planting and, too, seeding. The routine is that weeds come out, flowers go in and then lastly, seeds fill spaces that could benefit from, say, a burst of cosmos or a trail of nasturtium.

But there is another clap of thunder, followed by a downpour and I retreat indoors, hearing the message loud and clear – the Gods are angry! Quit running away and finish your paper work!

But I don’t finish because two hours later, it’s quiet again. The ground is too soggy to plant, so Ed and I attack weeds by the sheepshed. Selectively.  I long realized that if I am to be happy at the farmette, I have to look away from the jungle that grows by the barn and shed. We’ve brought most of the land under some semblance of order, but this one place – where raspberries are still galloping in random directions and creeping Charlie and burdock and every imaginable weed has set up residence, smothering any worthwhile plant in its path – this strip defies good intentions. 

There’s a small flower bed along the path to the shed -- one that I planted a few years back, and it has a gorgeous lavender bush and a Russian sage and a few random lilies and a dazzling cloud of golden coreopsis and I weeded them this afternoon...

 

...and Isis played with the pulled catnip, getting nice and high on the taste and smell of this heady plant, and it was rather a pleasant spell...

...and the rains stayed away, against all odds. I brought my peanut butter sandwich and cup of macchiato out to the picnic bench and we watched the chipmunk come out to assess what fine meals had been planted for his own consumption.

After, I had to retreat inside, to again pick up my work. But not before surveying the front of the house where, right now, lilies of the valley are growing in wild abandon. I clip some and stick them in an old olive oil bottle from Sorede. 

If you haven't sniffed on a lily of the valley stem lately, do so now. You may never recover, but you'll be better for it.

earthy thoughts

It is quite true that for the entire month of May, I am tempted to do nothing more here than recount the horrors of weeding.

Are they horrors though?

Ed tells me today that I should pay him what I would pay into a health club. What is it, he speculates -- $30 a month? His point is that he, by providing me with opportunities to throw myself at improving his land, has added years to my life. My retort is that my preparing for him fresh vegetables and grains daily, nay, several times each day, I add years to his life.

I was eating pounds of fresh tomatoes way before you started cooking for me.

That’s right, always remember those tomatoes. And the other days?

This is our conversation. On these essential points, it does not vary much.

Though sometimes, the back and forth comes at odd times. On good nights, we both have periods of wakefulness at the same (ungodly) hour. (On less synchronized nights, one sleeps while the other reads a computer perched on his belly; on worst possible nights, there's that, interspersed with cat comings and goings.) It is a good night. We are both fully awake at 2:35 a.m.and so we talk economics and politics and, in concluding that nothing is predictable nor, therefore, easy to manipulate, we eventually fall asleep.

I mention this because it is such a luxury to not worry about being tired the next day. 

Saturday. My daughter and I go to the downtown market. The big market. First time for me this year. What stands out? Let me limit it to two things: running into familiar faces – of vendors and friends...

...and, too, let’s not forget, it’s a spring market still. Before the fruits and veggies take charge, you have, in spring time, endlessly beautiful flowers.

Which brings me right back to the farmette. A day of planting. With a final run to the Flower Factory, to pick up coveted additional perennials.

Ed sits at the side and watches me fill the cart. He scratches his head, studies the tags, scratches his head again...

What, more? Are you sure?

I’m sure. I grin broadly. Buying plants, for me, is as satisfying as buying jewelry might be for another.

I add a few more.
In the scheme of things, it's not a large amount, but to Ed, paying for a flower always feels extravagant. For me, even in the toughest times, flowers have been on the table.

I continue searching, contemplating, imagining. Ed gets fidgety. He walks over to the sandbox. It's a good distraction for little ones and big Ed.

Finally, I’m done.

It’s early still. Three more hours of daylight left, three more hours of digging, moving, planting, until there is no more daylight left.

Late, very late, after reheated soup, after all’s put away, we watch a movie about an English neurosurgeon who does work, often on hopeless cases, in the Ukraine. A tough movie, not fitting perhaps for the most beautiful day of gardening, but, you can never get too soft, too complacent, too close to the feeling that you’re in some way deserving.  And so we watch.

And the day rolls into night and I’m thinking it’s time to start plugging elements of paper work into these slow moving days of working the earth. I need to finish off the tasks of the semesters. It's not summer yet. Can't be fooled. Not for more than a few days at a time.

dedicated to weed removal

A couple of observations: the lettuce is growing.  Slowly, but it’s getting’ there. Ed tells me we can pluck those baby leaves pretty soon now.

Second point (and after it I'll stop numbering): isn’t it interesting that we take out one thing and then, seconds later, put in something else? This is what we do: pluck out a weed, shovel in a different plant. Out, in, remove, replace. You could say that all my nonwork hours today were spent on the plucking side of the equation: the removal, the clearing.

Why? I have grander ideas on how I should spend my soon to be (after exam work) free time.

Here's one reason: Ed got up before dawn to create a new flower bed.

And I was up soon after, clearing it and so long as I was clearing it, I extended my great vacuuming hands and dug out weeds in neighboring patches. Like in this place – weedless, as of today.

(I appear to have forgotten that I could use gloves. My hands are raw from the hours of digging out roots.)

(Another side note: don't think that weeding is over and done with. You need only cast an evening glance toward the barn and the sheep shed to understand that there's lots more where that came from.)

We were to plant in the afternoon, but there wasn’t time. And so my hands ache, my back is sore and all we have to show for it is a truckload of weeds and nothing in their place.

Gardening is tough work. I sometimes wonder why I love it so.