Sunday challenge

I have a challenge for you. I’m going to put up six photos from today. I could wrap text around them, but I don’t think I have to. If you’re an Ocean reader, even a quite recent Ocean reader, you’ll know exactly what I would have written here, had I chosen to write.

So, my six photos:

My parting comment: I learned yesterday (in reading my adolescent journals) that one writes more when one knows less what one has to say (which is why such writing amounts to scribbles, worthless scribbles). So maybe conversely, one write less when one knows more what one has to say.

If all this is too complicated and you'd like to remind me that you don't read blogs in order to put your mind into a spin, I'll say this: it rained, I wrote, cooked and I admired, from the porch, the world outside.

mollycoddling

Parents always wonder if they are spoiling their baby by picking her up when she cries. I was totally anxious about this myself – the little one wanted to be held at all hours and I obliged and then worried that I was ruining her for life. One Saturday morning, I read that a famous child psychologist was fielding questions by phone. I called, got through to him, presented my dilemma.

Well now, he said and I could almost hear him yawn. What do you think you should be doing?

I nearly hung up on him. Much later, I understood why he asked what he did.

Anyway, I kept picking the girls up and they seem to have survived and developed glorious and independent lives and still I read in various news sources that people continue to ask this same old question.

But on the issue of flowers, I never had any doubt. Flowers love to be mollycoddled and you cannot spoil them by it: feed them when they're hungry, water them early or late in the day, snip them, tuck them in with a warm something or other for the winter – and they’ll be so much the better for it!

So, anticipating the heat today (again! How many times have I said to Ed – this will be the last hot day of the summer, only to be proven wrong...), I was up early watering my mollycoddled beauties. And admiring the many that are still popping out with smiling, charming, colorful faces.

Both Ed and I join my older daughter (the same one who caused me all that worry more than thirty years ago) at the market.

(It's a hot day. Vendors refresh themselves. With cucumbers if nothing else...)

At Matt’s stand, we admire the eggplant. The one dibbed “looks like Nixon” sells quickly. I’m not sure if it’s because of the profile, or the fact that it’s a healthy looking piece of vegetable.


 

We talk to Matt and his selling pal George H. about their forthcoming travels. And I ask Ed why he has become so disinclined to go anywhere this summer, this fall.

Because it’s so beautiful here.

Silly reason! Of course it’s beautiful! And it will be beautiful when we return!

You go. Sometimes Ed worries that I am not enough like him, at other times he worries that I am becoming too much like him. You like to travel.

And so I hatch some plans for some time in a month or two. Can’t do anything now. Busy with work, with wedding anticipations. After that, I tell myself, I need to head out. Only to return after to the loveliest farmhouse this side of any ocean.

shuffle

I’m fairly patient. Fairly. Tell me that my flowers won’t bloom until next year and I’m okay with that. But if I want change and I decide to proceed toward that goal – there’s no holding me back.

So, I tell the relevant person at work, I need to move things out of my office. I’m downsizing.

You’ve hit a busy time for the university. A couple of weeks. I can get someone in there in a couple of weeks. Or so.

I go to my office today and I assess the prospects. My mishmash of furniture leftovers looks awful. The space is crowded. There are boxes upon boxes of old papers, stacks (on the floor) of new books – woah! When did I ever let it get this bad?

The Law School owes me a desk and a chair. They’re waiting for the word from me.

And yet...

I look around the tiny but beautiful room. If I get the love seat out (what was I thinking when I brought it in?) and I eliminate the refrigerator (once upon a time, I kept milk there for the espressos that I stove topped on a little burner) and if I got rid of useless books and dozens of boxes and if I moved the desk this way and placed my computer that way...

Two weeks. I have to wait two weeks. No movers around, no hulky men here to help me with anything.

Well now, I can do this! I’m not old, not old at all. I can move love seats out of the office (say what??? It has a foldaway bed inside?? Lord...). Uff, heavy. I can do it!

After that, moving the heavy wooden desk to the opposite side of the room is easy. And discarding old volumes –  really, like clothing, if you haven’t worn it in three years, give it up! I can do this, I can do this!

I see mouse droppings on the windowsill, where the desk once stood. Ha! And you tell me the farmhouse is where I’m likely to find mice! No matter. I know how to clean up after mice, after cats (no cats here, too bad I suppose), I know how to move it all out and rearrange so that instead of looking cluttered, it looks – sane.

Now, I can still claim a wonderful and new desk set, because my computer rests on my own rickety table. But I think, this crazy funky set up of mismatched ancient pieces is really ... not so bad.

I leave my office. I’m impatient, but I can sleep on this for a day or two. It’s the weekend. I’ve moved enough for one day.

Can I leave you with farmer Lee’s sunflowers? They’re peaking right now. Crucial days for sunflowers and for those of us who are slowly setting the scene for the year ahead.

things I wrote

Predawn:

I wake to the sound of scraping. Harsh, abrasive scraping.

Ed! Do you hear that?
I look and see that there is no Ed. Not in the farmhouse anyway. At 6 in the morning, Ed’s on a ladder, doing the scraping.

Now?

I read on the Internet that if you work before dawn, you wont disturb the wasps.

I might as well be up too. He scrapes, I water the flowers.

And finally we eat breakfast.

Outside, the light is brilliant, the truck farmers' crops are reaching an obvious state of wonderfulness..

 

Later:

I hadn’t planned on working on the grand re-edit of my book until later, much later. But I couldn’t resist. And as I worked along, I thought that perhaps, to be thorough, I ought to reread my childhood diaries. (I began writing them when I was eleven.)

Ed, would you go with me to storage? Storage is a place where stuff is kept. Stuff that no one wants or needs and at the same time, no one has the heart to get rid of. True, I would throw most of my family's storage away, but I know my family regards me as unsentimental in this regard. So we have storage and the stuff stays there and no one ever looks at any of it. Except that today I want the trunk – the one I brought with me from my early years in the States, the one where I would store childhood diaries.

I can’t open the lock at the storage place. We work our way through all the storage rooms in the building. Oh oh. I was working the wrong lock. Ed opens it, we’re inside.

Oh, there's the steamer! The trunk that has it all! We haul it to a space where I can open it.. Everything around us is dusty, accumulated from years of indifference.

I open it. Letters. So many letters! When you travel away from your family, your homeland, your friends -- you write and receive letters. I seem to have kept them all. Thousands of letters!

But no diaries.

I glance this way, that way. No, they’re not here.

We leave. I need a pause. We go to Paul’s, we go to the Fitchburg market – distractions all. And darn good distractions! At the market, we buy a baguette from our favorite here – La Baguette...

...and we buy corn and we admire the exchange of chicks. These guys.

No, not chickens. Turkeys.

I ask the kids if the birds will be big and grown by Thanksgiving. Oh yes, they get big, they reassure me.

Still later: 

In the evening friends stop by. Ones who do not mind that all we have to offer is garden tomatoes and curds.

Because Thursday is market day and therefore we always have fresh curds on hand.

And much later:

I ask Ed – that plastic bin in the basement – is it yours?
No...

I open it and there I find the journals. 

I start reading.

It’s humbling to read what you wrote at the age of eleven. And twelve. And thereafter. You like to think of yourself as open-minded, insightful and hardworking. At eleven, I was none of the above.

I don’t have it in me to cook a real dinner tonight, so I scramble eggs, cut up tomatoes and cucumbers and call it a meal. Sometimes our meals are very uncomplicated.

transitions

Can I interest you in admiring some more humming birds? This time I didn’t even leave the porch. Hence the quality of the photos.

(I mean, you need only compare that to a photo of breakfast -- taken inside the screened space...)

One more time, though. The feisty humming bird:

It was a silly day, actually. Ed and I both stayed on the porch for a very long while. I had purchased something many, many weeks ago, to wear for my daughter’s wedding and I never bothered taking it out of the box, let alone trying it on for size. Today I did both and it’s fair to say that it was very difficult to breathe with that thing zipped up to the top. So suddenly I have the classic complaint – I have nothing to wear.

I searched the Internet for appropriate attire of the MoB (mother of the bride).

Ed suggested a t-shirt with a handpainted sign – something to the effect of “I am the happy mother.” I said no. And I dared ask if he maybe wanted me to rent him a suit for the occasion. I got a clear and very unambiguous answer to that one. I would not be surprised if he himself wore a t-shirt that said “I am the happy mother.” He does not much pay attention to the lettering on t-shirts.

In the late afternoon we finally made our way to Woodman’s, Madison’s most unpleasant grocery hangar and Walmart’s, the world’s most unpleasant store of any kind. It had to be done. I tried to speed through both, but that’s not easy. Ed gets distracted by such things as pink tennis balls. They support cancer research, I tell him. At 2 cents per container of balls? Very generous. We buy them anyway.

At Walmart’s, we also look for the free blood pressure measuring device. We each take turns measuring our blood pressure. The trick is to do it enough times until you get a result you really can be proud of.  It took Ed only three times and it took me four. I attribute it to my recently poor lifestyle habits – the ones that have accompanied me through out this writing frenzy. I am not surprised that writers never look especially healthy.

At home, I reheat the chili and I make a fresh salad and Ed bikes (because it’s Wednesday) and I think -- even in this holding pattern, where it’s not quiet yet time to work, but it’s no longer a free summer, where the weather is still very warm, but the mornings are cool, fall-like almost, where I’m one foot here and the other there -- even in this time, life remains very, very good.

cornbread

I’m downsizing again. Not at the farmhouse. In my office. I want to offload a chair, a desk, a mini refrigerator where I once kept milk for coffee. I want the feel of emptiness. To do away with clutter.

One odd thing about my office is that it is filled with a hodgepodge collection of my own furniture. I’d come to the Law School from a nonprofit and that nonprofit had so few resources that many of us purchased our own furnishings when working there. It was all second hand and a tad dated, even two dozen years ago. Today, it’s downright retro.

I could have done what everyone else does when they accept work at UW – filled my office with whatever the school had to offer. But I hated to see my old pieces go to waste and so I brought them with me and moved them in.

But here’s a reality: my office is small and the furniture is clunky. You know how desks were once massive and heavy? That’s my desk. And another important point: I never use that desk. I remain in a corner, at a tiny table where my computer sits and the big wooden desk is just a showpiece, nothing more. Since I no longer have sentimental attachment to such things as ancient heavy desks --  out it goes. And the old chair and the refrigerator for the milk that I haven’t stored for years.

Ed, ever the entrepreneur, asks – how much did you get for it?

Nothing.

Nothing?

I gave it all away. To my colleagues. I’m not going to charge my colleagues for my old stuff.

I see pity in his eyes. He’s thinking that I truly do not know how to be a capitalist. We are different in this way.

So this is what I did today: I remotely cleaned out my office. It was significantly less satisfying than writing my book, but it had to be done.

Earlier, I watered...

...and then we eat a late breakfast on the porch, followed rather quickly by a lunch on the porch...

Writing, by the way, is terribly unhealthy and I watch myself deteriorate into a state of atrophy and physical lethargy that is quite unusual for me. The best that I can say for myself these days is that we occasionally play tennis. As compared to our usual activities, that’s rather pathetic.

So now that the school year is almost upon us and I am indeed writing/editing my book less, I think I should return to moving more. We don’t bike to Paul’s (you have to understand – it’s really tough to get to his café now, as the roads between us an his place are all torn up because, well, because people believe in highways and expensive and irrelevant exit ramps more than they believe in trains... harrump). We bike to Lake Waubesa.

And lo, there is a tennis court right by it! Not a great tennis court – it’s riddled with cracks through which weeds grow, but it’s empty (who would want to use it, given the proximity of very excellent courts to the west of us) and so we play.

And after, I sit Ed down on a chair out front...

...and I trim his beard.

I'll be doing this on the 20^th of each month (okay, I’m a day late). Because it’s a pleasant reminder of the day we first hung out together. Ocotober 20^th. Seven years ago.

Dinner? Well, one has to do something with Farmer Lee’s cucumbers and all those tomatoes. I make a salad out of the both and then a huge pot of turkey chili – with  multiple  tomatoes from the garden. And because I miss putting things in the oven, I bake a cornbread.






The first time I ever came to Ed’s farmette, he had baked cornbread for me. Probably he'll have liked his own better. It was out of a mix and very very cheap.

so beautiful

The tail end of the painting of the farmhouse is getting to be a tail without a visible end.

Are you finishing the trim today? It’s just one more of the series of brilliantly sunny days we’ve been having.

I’m stuck. I know he has a rotting board to replace and there isn’t a good way of doing it except lying flat on the sloping roof over it. I can understand why he would postpone that step. But there’s more to it: I’m not sure if I can get the wasps out from where they’re hiding.

Can’t you just for that one bit of wasp nest spray them out of there?

It would kill them. I may have to wait until fall, when the cold air pushes them out.

Ah.

And the front entrance. That same front entrance, for which I had drawn elaborate designs last year. Will you get to that this year?
Oh, I don’t know.

On the other hand, as we sit over breakfast on the porch, he looks up and once again throws out the idea of painting the ceiling white. We’ve left the wood naked and plain and we think a coat of white paint would considerably spruce things up.

Such a project though. I suggest doing two beams and sections a day. We’d be done in ten days.

Maybe...

That’s Ed’s operative word. Maybe.  And since most of the work that accompanies these projects is done by him, I can’t say that I am in a good position to nudge things forward. And so I take care of the flowers and we talk about projects and the days pass and they’re good days and really, everything else is less important.

Okay, let me walk you through the pics for today:

Breakfast on the porch. No surprise there. Yawn...

Then, as we pluck beetles off the rose bushes, I look up and see yet again (and I’m sure it wont be the last time) how lovely the farmhouse is right now, framed by roses and coreopsis and nasturtium and yes, still the lilies and cone flowers and and and... all of it.

But back to the ongoing competition between the two of us: who can spot the most beetles to pluck. In doing this, we pay close attention to the bees – today we find a new friend – the brown bee that I generally associate with hives in Poland or France, not one we’ve seen here in recent years and so we are jubilant. Every new type of bee is a friend.

And I check my little Yellow Rose of Texas (well, she’s probably not from Texas, but it recalls that song) and noted that she’s putting on that final burst of bloom before retreating for the season. So, here’s one for you, girl. You stuck it out in your new home this difficult year. I’m proud.

...while Isis watches...

...and Ed tempts me with melted curds on garden tomato.

As for my big writing project – well, I’m pretty much done for now. I need to do a big rewrite (it’s not the first, not even the second, more like the third and in some section, the fourth or fifth) and I want to take my time with that. By this time next year, I’ll surely be finished.

The last paragraphs were crafted while humming birds darted ever so quickly in and out of my flowers (Look carefully -- they're there!). I’ll always remember that.

So, I should celebrate, no? In my own way, I do. We go to Paul’s and Ed dozes and I drink a blueberry tea and after, we play a spirited game of tennis and he tells me – you’re getting better...

In the evening, I toss a salad, steam corn cobs and sautee Oyster mushrooms, eggs and garden chives. Our resident farmer’s sister comes to our door and gives us many many cucumbers. The day ends with the fresh and honest. Life is so beautiful.

from the porch

Well now, if you don’t call this a tough, tougher than nails posting day, I don’t know what would qualify. First of all, to give myself time, more time to write and also to align myself a tad more with the person at home who scorns neatness, I have switched to a biweekly (rather than weekly) farmhouse cleaning schedule (with spot checks for cat hairs and such in between). That bi-weekly cleaning moment fell on today. The still sore back made scrubbing the shower stall to a shine a challenge.

But wait, it gets more boring than that. I put on a ridiculous outfit of tight sweats and a petticoat type thing (because it was there, okay?) and set about to listen to hours of tapes. I had to do it and I had the time today to do it and so I listened and took notes. These tapes are only somewhat useful in that they let me do some fact checking in the text of my writing project, but I would be negligent not to listen to them (again – I’d already heard them some years back). So I listened. From the porch.

 

In between there are the usual computer skirmishes and searches. (It’s very easy to misplace tapes when they’re actually not tapes at all but files on a computer and who knew which computer – turns out not this one, nor that one and not on the back-up hardrive and if you haven’t searched for stuff on your back-up hardrive lately, you haven’t lived!)

And Isis came and went and the sun came and went and sometimes Isis and the sun came and went together...

And then I wrote some more.

In the evening, we had a pleasurable hour with my daughter and her fiancée and that’s always a sweet way to interrupt a Sunday. They're tired, but don't let that fool you. They are happy.

We eat out on the porch and it storms, briefly but violently and that makes me want to put down the (eek! metal!) fork and go right back inside, but I am surrounded by braver (and more realistic) types and so we persevere and here I am alive to tell you about it.

Eventually the sun does shine again.

(Ed scrapes the bottom of the pan when the food is to his liking.)

After, he and I are settling in to an evening of writing, watching, reading and listening to the animal upstairs (in the attic?) move around.

Can it chew through a wall? I ask.

I don’t know, Ed tells me.

I sometimes think that he’d like these things to happen, just so he can learn how to fix the damage.

It's a beautiful night out there on the porch. Inside as well.