Sunday

It starts with the weather. Always the weather. A cloudy, moody day. Though not initially. You surely could not find fault with the sunrise.





Breakfast on the porch -- the one "outside" space rarely affected by what's out there. When Ed say -- let me go and do some work... I interrupt and say -- no, not yet, let's linger a little. It's so calm.





And we do linger and we have our moment of calm.

I thought then about how I should space activities this week. The big clean up, the polish, the shine, the last tweak in the garden -- that's Wednesday stuff, before the first visitors arrive Thursday. Wednesday, too, is the mowing extravaganza. I will do it because I want it just so. It will take up a good portion of the day to finish the final cut.

And today? What can I work on from my increasingly shorter list?

There is the preclean. You may laugh: why preclean if you're going to clean on Wednesday? Well now, today I'm getting into the crevices. Vacuuming ceilings. Dusting things that wont have to be dusted again. Doing a massive laundry...

And I'm thinking: now is the time to test the septic system. When I worried that we hadn't tracked down the problem the last time it backed up half a year ago, when I thought we should rip everything up and start with a new system (my solution for everything, it seems!), when I fretted that it will choose to back up on us in the week of the wedding, Ed suggested that we flood the system, all waters running, just days before the wedding. If it shows no signs of backing up, we will certainly sail through the week itself without a glitch.

So I did the laundry and ran the shower and flushed the toilet many times. Great! No sign of a back up in the farmhouse! Big sigh of relief!

What now? Let me attack the sheep shed.

You'll recall, perhaps, that the sheep shed is where Ed housed himself before I agreed to move to the renovated by us farmhouse (now three years ago). In the first six years of my life with him, I rarely came down to the farmette. We spent all our time in the places I lived: first the apartment downtown, then the condo, also downtown. When Ed coaxed me to spend more time at the farmette, I balked. The farmhouse was unfinished, dirty, not at all inviting, not even for an afternoon. The sheep shed -- worse. It houses many of Ed's machines and there is the perpetual smell of grease and oil and who knows what else. And of course, I'm the clean nut, Ed is the opposite.

Several times I volunteered to clean the sheep shed, but it was pointless. He didn't want his machine stuff disturbed. And even if I wiped down the kichenette and the bathroom, it never was good enough for me even as it was horribly discomforting for him.

One solution was to built a separate shed for me to hang out in. Ergo -- the building of the writer's shed. We never finished it (the project will be continued some day, with different use plans) because halfway through, I agreed to move permanently to the farmhouse.

Why this reliving of our history? Because when I went down to the sheep shed today (I rarely go there -- I have no reason to do so; it's his space and I don't care how cluttered and dusty it is), I smiled at the memories of my first attempts to clean the place up. And I smiled, too, because I was getting it ready for the wedding: it's a bathroom option for elderly guests who can't navigate the portable toilet system that has been rented and, too, it's handy for caterers who can access the sink there.

So I cleaned. And in running that shower and that toilet, I backed up the septic system and basically flooded the shed's bathroom with stuff you'd never want to see.


Tomorrow, the septic team will be here trying to again locate the problem. Will they? We don't know. It could be that the entire system will need to be dug up and we'll have to start from scratch. (That's a very complicated project.) The hope is that the correction will be easy and we will continue as before. If not, well then we can probably coast on borrowed time this week. I think.

No, I'm not at the point where you'd catch me singing -- "darling I love you, but give me Park Avenue" -- but I have to say, living in the country is not dull!


Disheartened somewhat by this new wrinkle, I needed a pick me up and nothing hollers happy times more than a trip to my new found perennial growers -- the two older women who who sell their  divided plants. We didn't buy much, but simply being among plants with people who love their flowers and especially their daylilies felt good. Joyous. It placed things in perspective. (And BTW, here's another day lily at the farmette, beginning its bloom. She's radiant and rather jolly, no?)






On our way home, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up ice cream bars for Ed. He had a hankering and we're slated to have some hot days before us so it seemed opportune. We looked at all the boxes of chocolate covered vanilla bars. The ingredients seemed positively frightening, but still, the hankering continued and so we bought a box. In true Ed fashion, he took out a few bars for the car ride home. I sampled one. The taste was exactly as you would remember it from fifty years ago were you alive then! And so we rode home munching nostalgia bars and admiring the beauty of our farmlands fronting the rural roads.

It was a very good moment.


My older girl and her husband came over for dinner and as we sat on the parch, the sun came out again and the moody strain of the day completely fizzled.





By the time I readied the coop for the night, the day had redeemed itself completely and I refused to give even a passing thought to sinks draining and toilets flushing. And that's a good thing.

I'll leave you with a photo of one of my most reliably blooming flowers -- for weeks now it has held steady and strong. Tonight's colors remind me of the Polish flag!





And now let the wedding week begin!

Saturday

The ten day weather forecast on weather.com has changed dramatically in its predictions for next Saturday. I have watched it show sunshine, showers and now -- isolated thunderstorms. You have to wonder why the website even bothers putting anything up for a day that's many weather systems away. Does it ever remain the same for the entire ten day period?

At least this morning was as last night's forecast predicted for us: sunny and warm. Good chicken release weather. (With a spectacular sunrise.)






Good breakfast on the porch weather.






And with a gentle breeze, good outdoor work weather. I methodically work through small tasks (no more big ones -- those are all done for the season), enjoying the summer-like feeling of a garden's abundance.






In fact, I enjoy it so much, that time slips by too quickly and when I ask Ed to go to the downtown Farmer's Market with me, it's already past noon. We're nearing the last few minutes of vendor presence. Just enough time to buy oyster mushrooms, cheese, strawberries and two bunches of the cheapest of cheap flowers -- ones that have staying power: daisies and clover, sold here:






We're back on the porch for a p. b. and j. lunch. It is at once quiet (anyone who uses our country road to get to the lake has gone by already and no one is coming back yet) and noisy (the wind moving in between all our trees is never quiet), in the best of ways. Had I followed the Sorede (south of France) habit of having a glass of rosé for lunch, I would be dozing in the sling back chair by now. But, habits belong to locations and I would no more sip rosé here for lunch than I would eat a croissant for breakfast. Funny how that works.

In the evening I lay down my daffodils stalks. One of the toughest things about mingling daffodils with your perennials is that your perennials are up and running and the daffodils are long gone and yet you're not allowed to cut them back until they turn yellow. I can never hold out that long, but I try! This year they got four weeks of post bloom life. Over the next few days I'll be cutting them back completely. I am SO done with them!

Time to put away the shovel, the clippers, the hose. The buckets of soil, the cartloads of chips. Cheepers, go back to your coop!





They do go back. Eventually.

pantyhose

Like so many women, I dislike wearing pantyhose. I was lucky that my work life did not require it. On the occasion that I'd wear a skirt, I'd search out a pair of tights. There is a difference, for those of you who haven't a clue as to why I should be fussy as to one but not the other.

Still, for a wedding, it seems fitting to look for the sheer stuff. And so two years ago, when my older girl got married, I bought two pairs -- in case one ripped (the cursed things are more fragile even than my chickens' eggs). Well, the first pair didn't rip and so I thought -- great! I'll save the second for my youngest girl's wedding!

...until I found out just this weekend that she's not wearing them and if she isn't wearing them then surely I don't have to! Moreover, when I queried a friend as to how unusual this would be, she informed me that women these days don't wear pantyhose. Sheer stockings, especially at weddings, are sort of passé.

Well now, how does this happen? You continue with your rules and habits as if they were there, scripted for everyone, into infinity (because surely pantyhose are a modern improvement on stockings and garter belts and I remember how much I disliked those! ).

So what else has changed and why isn't someone keeping me informed?! Like texting and Instagram -- both of which became de rigeur sometime when I wasn't looking and suddenly my old fashioned adherence to the blog just seems so quaintly archaic! My mom, she blogs -- my girls probably explain, benevolently looking my way in that special way you reserve for the very old.

That's okay. One has to distinguish oneself from the next generation. I guess for me, it'll be that pair of pantyhose that now has no future except to rest in my drawer as a testament to my antiquity. Let me show you what my great grandma has in her drawers. It's something called panty hose! Isn't that weird? 


In other news -- well, there was sunshine and plenty of it.



at dawn




at breakfast


All day long. Since it's Friday, I took time out to do weekly grocery shopping, realizing that I wont be doing it again until late July, as I'm leaving soon after my daughter's wedding. So I stocked up.

And though I am now getting jittery about all that I still have to do in the days before the wedding, I did take the time to go for a walk with my older girl. Two things worth mentioning from my time with her:

First, there is the matter of cats. That girl cannot say no to the sweet face of a needy cat online and so as of this week, she and her husband took in two foster cats (in addition to their permanent cat Goldie, who has been featured many times on Ocean). The two newcommers are brothers and they cannot find a permanent home easily for the simple reason that they are incredibly shy. I mean, over the top retreating. All day, they hide in the darkest most enclosed space, one on top of the other, refusing to come out until everyone in the house is asleep.




virgil





lucas


Whatever trauma they endured in their first years of life surely has left a mark. Beautiful cats. Hiding.

(I did warn my girl that just because you think you are a temporory "foster" caregiver to an animal, doesn't mean that you're likely to ever hand that animal back to wherever she or he came from. I should know. I think my girl muttered uh-huh, or some other such phrase that you use when you're not really listening.)

The second thing to note is that there is a world out there beyond the farmette, even if I haven't really focused on it much in recent weeks. For instance, as we walked by the lakes, I had to pause and admire the skyline.





I suppose I'm not really a Madisonian anymore, since I live in the country outside the city limits, but I still find this view of our city to be quite special.

Alright. Back to the place that catches most of my attention at the moment: the farmette. Not many photos today. I worked awfully hard at something no one will ever even notice -- clearing the weeds under the old orchard trees. My theory is that the guests would have noticed had I left them there and, too, I'll do anything to make the place less inviting to bugs and mosquitoes. And so I pushed a mower and clipped and pruned and did the dirty work that actually is what the farmette needs most to look her best. Flowers are all well and good and I did plant my day lilies in the evening, with great care, but planting doesn't occupy one tenth the time that clearing, pruning, weeding do.

I feel about the farmette now like I do about clothes just after all the laundry has been washed, folded and put away: it's great to do this massive cleaning. Even though I know darn well that in a short period of time, like the clothes neatly hanging in your closet, the farmette will all get disheveled and overgrown again. But for one fine moment, the weeds will be cleared, just like the laundry that will have been done, with the scent of clean cotton and line dried linen hanging in the air and all will feel right with the world, or at least your small corner of it.


Honey moon tonight. Big, orange, full. Rare. Beautiful.

Thursday

Steady, deliberate, rhythmical work. Day lilies to plant. Stakes to put in. And watering: established flowers can be left alone even in week-long dry spells. Not so new arrivals. They need a more pampered summer season.

It was a good day to devote again to outdoor work. True, there are the emergent bugs now, but not in a way that would disturb me. So I worked.

What can I give you on a day like this? Well, a sunrise! I mean, how many of you were up to see the sun take hold of the sky this morning? Claim mine then! Here it is!






Oops, not yet risen! Let's wait a few minutes... Okay -- up and out now!






Breakfast? Well, you probably had your own. Let's pull our breakfast memories together. Here's mine:






And after? Since I stayed in the garden, I'll show you some special bloomers, including the first display of a day lily! This one has ruffles and delicate lilac and yellow tones -- there are a million variations!






And so long as we're on the topic of flowers (aren't we always here, this spring, on Ocean, on the topic of flowers?) let's recognize the June rose (wet, after a hose-down). If you have a rose bush that survived all the polar vortex issues we had this winter, you're likely quite proud. I'm quite proud.






Polar vortex! Oh, remember how this land looked just a couple of months back? Consider the difference! To the front...






To the back...






Alright. What next? Well, Ed and I took one of our road trips.


 


We don't go great miles and more often than not there'll be a stop at Farm and Fleet somewhere along the way, but these *trips* have been a great favorite for both of us. Today's lasted only about two or three hours. First stop: farmers' market. And now you can finally tell that we're in full growing season mode.






Our purchases included strawberries.





But why? We have such a large berry patch at the farmette! And yet, right now, we can eek out no more than half a dozen berries per day. They are so delicious that the chipmunks have been bringing their entire extended families for a feast! I ask the vendor how he keeps his berries away from these thieves. Grow many, he tells me. Some will be eaten, but they'll leave some behind for you. I foresee next year an expansion of our strawberry fields.


We also bought a baguette and peas (our aren't quite ready yet).











Done with the market. Where to then? We have a destination -- a twin household just south of Verona where the women decided about a dozen years ago to divide and sell their perennials. Right now, they have hundreds of offerings (including many a dozen of day lily varieties!) and it is grand to see their set up. And yes, we carted away a day lily or two and a hosta...





......but the main thrill was to take a look at how a person might fashion a hobby to be self sustaining.

After that -- well, Farm & Fleet. I needed more chicken treats (a combination of sunflower seeds, raisins and nuts) and while there, I needed to steer Ed to a rack of shorts to replace what he has been wearing around the farmette. Here, take a look:





Now all I need is to get him to throw away the torn pair. That's tomorrow's project.

Tonight, the chickens were calmer, gentler, and seemingly even happier. Maybe it's the faintness of the sunshine (they prefer it that way). Maybe it's that they had my company outside for the good part of the day. In any case, their rush to greet me now brings a grin to my face and I don't even flinch as they run through the flower bed.





It's late now, that wonderful lateness of a mid June night when it barely is dark and you know that sunrise isn't that far off either. Such a beautiful time of the year! For you as well, I hope.

in honor of...

First, in line with the suggestion offered by commenter, I did acquire a plant today, though not a cedar pot.

The plant (or actually three)? Day lilies. A careful reader of the newspaper might worry that I am inadvertently paying homage to one Mr. Sharp, a 90-year old drug mule -- featured in the Magazine section of the NYT this week. I am not, though reading about this old man who went from being a famous and beloved cultivator of day lilies to being a major transporter of cocaine to Detroit reminded me of the place day lilies hold in my own heart.

I began my now thirty year love affair with perennials by being completely wowed by this flower. Two virtues stood out: first, even though each bloom lasts only one day -- one day! -- the plant can keep on flowering for weeks on end and indeed, the species hemerocallis "happy returns" can carry a show from late June all the way into September! That's very impressive.

Too, its second virtue caught my attention. My very first garden was in a spot with a variety of trees and shrubs not too far away. I worried about planting flowers with fragile roots close to these big guys. Until I read that a hemerocallis  can stand up to tree roots any day! None of this flimsy stuff! Day lily roots are powerful!

And so my first garden had day lilies. As did my second garden. And right now, at the farmette (my third garden in life), where I grow hundreds of flowers, I would say that the day lily is the favorite. It appears many times in all beds and indeed, in the first large bed fronting the farmhouse, it is the dominant flower.

I love day lilies. Thus a fitting end to this year's ambitious planting season would be to put in just a few more of them -- targeting now not the wedding week, but the weeks of July,  August and even September, when there is very little to rave about in a summer bed. I have to thank the writers of the article on the arrest of Mr. Sharp for the reminder that deep within every person, there may be a day lily hiding in his soul.


The title of the post was prompted by another set of "honors": today I received (in one packet) three certificates,commending my 25 years of service for the state and for the university. That is, Governor Walker sent me a certificate of commendation, and the chancellor sent me a certificate of service, and then there was another certificate of commendation from Governor Walker: a duplicate of the first! Does that mean that my work was commendable enough to warrant twice the certification?

Of course, all of this is silly anyway. I have never hung any certificate on any wall -- office or home -- so I am deliberating why it is that anyone would even keep any of these papers. Perhaps because it feels disrespectful to the institutions that churn them out to simply toss these papers in the recyclable bin. But it surely is tempting to do just that.


Not too many photos for you today. We spent the afternoon chasing down my day lilies, then buying a faucet valve and paint at Menards. And, too, I had a dinner out with my old work friends. Late night, camera tucked away for most of the day.

And yet, there is always a photo from that early morning walk to and from the coop. Today of Oreo -- looking around for a hen to love...






And breakfast, which I know looks like yesterday's breakfast, but still, it was a good moment.






And let me post a grateful nod to the peonies in the garden. I have some half dozen plants blooming profusely right now. Theirs is a short burst of color. But they're greatly appreciated.







And to the campanula: how reliably perky these bells can be!






Finally, evening. I return home just as the sun finally triumphs over the clouds and asserts itself over the western edges of the farmette, as if to say -- you managed well enough without me, but I can tell you're glad I'm back.

letting go

I just called the Menards store in west Madison. They still have a few cedar pots left.
Ed is not impressed. Why do you need another cedar planting pot? Is it that you want to bring something indoors? Because otherwise why not plant whatever it is that you still have to plant in the ground?
I don't actually have anything more to plant...
So where do you want to put this pot?
I don't know. Well, I do know... (hesitate) No, I don't know.

When you have worked on something so hard, so hard, so that most of your waking hours for two months have been consumed by this, it's hard to then just stop. Or even slow down. It's like being a parent, watching a daughter move off into her adult world. It takes a while to get used to not tracking the details of her life.

I still have lists of things to do in the next ten days, but increasingly, they are less about the outside space.

Except for one task - the perpetual "tidy the garden after the chickens" task.

Their scratching at the dirt remains so disconcerting to me, that after one such tidying effort (where I rake back dirt and wood chips that have been dislodged) I go upstairs to a napping Ed (he's been a little under the weather) and tell him that if he got rid of the chickens today, behind my back, I would breathe a sigh of relief.

If you want to return the chickens, we can do that you know. They're not ours after all.
I shake my head. I could not. I am forever trapped in the love of their happiness, their contentment, their belief that all days will begin with a spring out of the coop into the waiting world of worms and watermelon rinds and end in the warm comfort of their perch in the coop that they have learned to call home. The sweet pleasure of watching them thrive is exactly that: the pleasure of knowing that they are happy, that they feel this space is as much theirs as it is ours. It's hard to take that away from them, to snuff out their trust in us -- their protectors, their safe haven in an awfully mean world.

So I get up as always, very early. It's cloudy and so I offer no photos of a golden sun.

Later, we eat breakfast, but in the kitchen. (Did I tell you? It's cool outside.)






And I take care of mostly indoor tasks. Bill paying. Window washing. With an occasional burst of flower bed fixing.





Cleaning, mowing, weed whipping -- that'll come early next week. For now, I merely fix and mend damage.

Eh, maybe I'll get that cedar planting pot tomorrow. A gradual slowdown is much healthier than a sudden cessation.

In the meantime, I can admire the bees' discovery of things in bloom. Each day something is added.





Even as small details are scratched away.

Monday

If I count the number of times I've written here, on Ocean "another lovely, sunny day," I think I would come up with a staggering total. This is the winning side of the upper Midwest: we have more sunny days than rainy ones, more blue sky than cloud cover. Of course, you always remember the extremes: the violent storms, the polar vortex, the rain that never seemed to end even though it was probably only a day long affair. But sunny days, ah, sunny days -- they dominate.

Today the farmette animals got me up and out even before sunrise (which right now takes place at 5:17 a.m.).











(After the first run, the girls always spend a while tidying up.)






It's wiser just to force yourself up and out when the first complaint sounds -- to get up and do the animal chores and then try to squeeze in another hour or two of sleep afterwards. Sometimes it works.

At other times, once outside, I get distracted. A few weeds to pull, a pattern of light to admire...






Today, Oreo offered his own distraction. Because he is crippled (remember? a one legged rooster), he has a hard time finding a willing hen to satisfy one of his basic needs (he only has three basic needs that I know of: to eat, to mate and to protect the brood). They can outrun him and quite often they do. Finding himself intensely frustrated, twice now in the morning he has come to me while I'm crouching over something and explored the possibilities of mounting me from the back. Needless to say, he quickly remembers I am not a hen and in case he has any doubts, I surely tell him as much in rapid fire English.  (Hens only now how to coo and cackle, though I do think that Scotch's repertoire is somewhat broader.)

We've been reading a lot about rooster issues (you gotta do that if you really care about your animals) and many "experts" suggest asserting your humanness when roosters misbehave by either feeding them or holding them. Apparently hens don't do either and so you reinforce your difference. So there I was, at 5:20 by now, walking around with Oreo in my arms. It is amazing that I managed to get any sleep after that, but I did. A little.

After a beautiful breakfast...






...there was outdoor work to attack, as the list of essential tasks grew during the weekend of the young couple's visit. Paths to build, front yard limbs to cut down so vans with food and equipment could come through, a new place to weed and tend to as we decided on a different positioning of the portable toilets. No, the farmhouse one toilet wont do for such a crowd and besides, it's up steep stairs -- not so easy for the very old and very young. [And if you're going to ask me how we intend to handle that when we're too old to climb those stairs, I'll tell you that I never plan that far in advance. Lightening could strike tomorrow and the worry would have been pointless.]







It grew warm. Very warm, but I persevered even as Ed took many breaks for many naps. But by late afternoon, I had had enough and we did something that we haven't done for such a long time: we went to Paul's cafe for a snack (the usual for Ed -- a pickle, as it is the only place within spittin' distance that has good pickles according to him) and then we took our old rackets and our flat tennis balls to our secret public tennis court amidst the pines and we had a very very nice few minutes showing off how rusty our game has become.

Finally, a late evening on the porch. There, I needn't even say it -- it's so obvious: it was a glorious day and a sublime evening. We specialize in both, here at the farmette, nestled in the state of Wisconsin.

Sunday

An unusual day in that it follows no routines, no predictable patterns.

I take that back. At 5, Isis is meowing for food and release and I hear the rooster crowing. It's drizzly wet outside, so going out is hurried. I pause only to photograph the ripening strawberries. Here they are, moments before a chipmunk comes and eats the whole lot of red ones.





The netting we have thrown over the berries does not deter chipmunks. What's the next strategy to get a crop out of our strawberry field? Still workin' on it.

Put aside the strawberries for now. Face the farmhouse. Appreciate the varous clumps of peonies coming into their own.






Thinking back, it was a restless night for me -- too many small details to think through and work out. But though the wedding is in some fashion beginning to occupy so many of my waking hours, I have to say that it is by my choice. After all, I am not cooking anything that weekend. The young couple has hired the Underground Food Collective to cater a simple Midwestern meal. All details surrounding food and drink and, too, the ceremony itself, have been taken care of by the soon to be marrieds. I merely provide the venue.

But there is a huge amount of *venue* out there!

This morning, we gathered on the porch for breakfast. Frittata with this week's eggs, then too, pancakes with our own rhubarb compote, and home made granola.


'


Oh, but I love having my daughters  here! Including this one who has to head back to Minneapolis this afternoon.





And shortly after the meal, the skies cleared and as the couple went over the various staging details with those who will be running the show on that day (less than two weeks now!), I sat back and thought more about all that was still before us.

When they left, the faremtte became eerily quiet. No voices, no sounds, no questions thrown out, no answers scribbled, recorded, forgotten.

Ed and I finish chipping the raspberries and I sit down to make my final final list and then I put it all aside and concentrated on eating a chocolate fudgsicle, defiantly avoiding the plunge back into outdoor work. For a while.

And then we plunge again. We weed according to the new guidelines (the young couple's input has caused us to reconfigure some of the paths and passageways) until we can weed and plunge no more. (Even the chickens are exhausted with our efforts.)






I wince at their clawing and scratching, but Ed reminded me that the beds look fine and we will survive their antics! We will!





Supper? Well, it's probably the worst meal that I ever "cooked" for Ed and myself: reheated egg fritata and reheated last night's pizza. Yum.