warming up

We're not getting the heat waves plaguing the west, but it's definitely warming up and the soil in the flower beds feels very dry. Nobody can say that we are past drought worries. In the next few days, I'll have to decide if I should let my flower beds go for the year (tempting), or whether I should keep them active and producing by giving them all a good soak.

For now, things look good, but this wont last if we don't get rain (or if I don't work the hose) soon...

My snipping this morning was interrupted by a phone call from a little girl asking shyly if there was any way that she could come over. Parents were temporarily without cars, so we'd suspended the regular Thursday farmhouse visit. That was a mistake. Of course I can do a pick up! Only, I hadn't eaten breakfast yet...

No problem! She'll join us for breakfast!

(me: if you could stand in front of your favorite flower, which would it be? Snowdrop: there are so many... maybe this one?)

(a new fairy on a flying unicorn came to live here...)

(preparing breakfast: three people, three different cuts of peaches...)

(on the porch: patient with Dance)

(breakfast at last! she says yes to a left over pain au chocolat...)

(in cleaning up in the kitchen, after breakfast, I'm thinking: that is one good view out the window!)

(When it's time to go home, she does her usual sprint to the tree...)

(and as always, a pause to sniff the phloxes!)

(Meanwhile, back at the house, we have the boy who really likes his home, especially since Covid...)

Thursday is market day for us and today is no exception.

But here's a first (well, if you look back to the last couple of years...): loaded with our market and CSA acquisitions, we climb on the motorbike and head to downtown Madison for a dinner out. 

Honestly, I cannot even remember when Ed and I last ate out at all, let alone at Brasserie V -- our go-to Madison eatery. I tried looking back at Ocean posts,  putting "moulles frites" into the search box and a post from Sorede popped up: we ate mussels and fries on the town square after a day on the beloved (by me) Franqui beach. June, 2011. I know we've eaten moulles frites since then, but not last year and not the year before because, well there was Covid and before that there was the winter and I don't like going out much when it's dark and cold outside.

Tonight did not feel dark and cold. Since we dined outside, it felt like Sorede.

(taken by a propped up camera: he's with cider, I'm with a bubbly rose)

We're not in a hurry to dine inside yet, but that could be because it's so lovely to eat outdoors. A little bit like in France, where tables crop up without much care as to the view or the street noise: it's food and it's outside and that's enough!

It felt enough for us!

Miraculously and gratefully vaccinated against a killer disease. Eating at a restaurant again. Makes you want to weep.

with love...

staying put

I asked my Polish friends on a Zoom call today (there were 8 of us) how many missed travel and would love to go somewhere to see the world. Only one raised her hand. It's not that no one in that group travels: most have been to places you and I wouldn't even consider going to. Ever. And some do necessarily travel to see kids who live far away or pursue a sport they've loved all their lives (skiing, kayaking). But only one had any curiosity about travel in its own right. To see some place or to be somewhere other than home. And since this wasn't always their mindset, I have to say I'm going to blame age. All but two have passed 70. At this age, home seems better than the alternatives.

The funny thing is, the effort required for getting to new and culturally or geographically different places is lesser for a Pole than it is for an American. Distances within Europe are just not that great. You don't have to fly to get anywhere, but if you do fly, you're really cutting travel time to a short couple of hours. At most. Here, by contrast, distances are huge, public transportation is limited, and you can't get to another continent unless you take a boat or a plane. It's expensive, it's complicated. Add to it age (without even delving into covid issues) and you have the ingredients of a stay-at-home future. At least for my cohort of people. 

So am I nearing the time when I, too, will only go someplace if there are family reasons to do so? Am I shortening my range? I detected an attitude of "I've seen all that I want to see" among my friends. Is it a sign of being less curious? Less willing to reach into an unknown pot of experiences, because you don't think you'll profit in any way from being somewhere other than home?

One trip at a time. We'll see after my next solo travel adventure how I feel about the whole idea of being away from home for at least a few weeks out of each year.

In the meantime, I snipped lilies. At home. You cannot tell from the photos, but the garden is beginning to think about the tail end of summer. The flowers, the abundance -- all that is still hovering around that famous July peak, but I can tell when the stalks have fewer buds and the leaves no longer stand upright. 

Still, that's only detectable for those of us who plunge into the jungle of flowers feet first. To the stroller passing through, all is lush and grand. Here are the farmette photos for today:

Morning in the gardens followed by breakfast. How's that for predictable!

Also predictable: a Wednesday eve bike ride for Ed. I felt like I ought to at least take a walk to ramp up my own movement for the day, so I headed for the local county park. Lovely place. The prairie is coming back just fine and the quiet is awesome.

And heading home, I paused to chat to these cranes. Believe me, they are way louder than me!

At home I did the one social thing today: I talked to Primrose. How I love FaceTime in moments like this! 

And I had to think -- are my grandkids going to be my occasional traveling companions going forward? Am I going to be one of those aging grandparents, who is wheeled through the gardens at Giverny by some kindly offspring of my offspring? 

Eh, I'm only 68. Years away from worrying about long distance travel. Well, at least one or two years away! Gulp.

color

If your gardening goal is to make a statement with vibrant colors, then this is your week. (I love color, but I don't need it to scream at me. I wouldn't say my flower beds are screaming right now, but I do think this year, the stronger colors -- orange, red, purple -- are making a statement! My daughter has a friend from D.C. visiting her this week and when the family and friend came to dinner at the farmhouse, I looked at the farmette landscape through her eyes and thought -- it surely wants to be heard!

In the morning, things are a little quieter, gentler. Some of the lilies are only partially opened and the low light gives them a softer look. As I snipped away, I counted 655 spent lilies. That's lower than the peak last year, possibly explained by the fact that the roadside flower bed is having trouble managing the drought (the soil is much worse there because of the winter road junk and the dense root system of the neighboring maples). Too, the front bed lilies are being gobbled by animals. Maybe groudhogs maybe deer probably both. I have very few blooms there to snip.

Aside from that front bed, everything else is looking good and healthy. The winter was kind to Wisconsin perennial gardens. This week, the flowers are at their fullest, finest and, as I said -- most colorful.

From my morning walk:

This newly planted lily has "strawberry" in its name. Yes, I can see it: strawberry colors.

("nymphs and shepherds...")

(the often ignored west facing bed is actually secretly magical...)

(vibrant!)

(double trouble, or double the fun?)

(a tiny fragment of the Big Bed...)

(Impossible to photograph the Big Bed in its entirety, but this pic shows a good bit of it...)

I didn't have time for regular ol' breakfast. I promised to pick up Snowdrop before 10 and at close to that hour, I was just finishing my work in the flower fields. That's okay: Ed and I aren't fussy about when we eat breakfast!

One item on my day's agenda is to pick up corn at Stoneman's farm up the road from us. Snowdrop is happy to tag along.

When she saw that the Stonemans were caring for young kittens and that she could watch and touch these little guys, Snowdrop vowed to return with me for every corn purchase this year.

The little girl loves cats. It is her bad luck that of the three cats in her family home, only one is totally agreeable toward kids and I'd probably not credit him with more than just being agreeable. Snowdrop loves cats anyway. I'm happy that Dance is beginning to shed her fear of the little one (all our cats are skittish around every human aside from Ed and me). Maybe some day they'll be best buds. For now, the girl is delighted to get a chance to pet the Stoneman farm kittens.

And now we have time for breakfast! Snowdrop joins us. (After a few moments in the garden.)

 

 

 

She never turns down a bowl of fruit.

 

Okay, I'm jumping straight to the evening because frankly, it comes not too long after breakfast! It's a very warm day and a warm night, and still, the porch feels pleasant enough for an outdoor dinner.

It's great to have them all here. With market beans, tomatoes and cucumber, farm corn and cheeper eggs, all you need is a light mustard dressing and some poached fish and sauteed shrimp to make a fine meal.

And after? A brief garden walk. With a sleepy Sandpiper who had his check up and shots today. (Did I hear right? 96 percentile in height!)

And there you have it: July 20th in full color. You just can't ignore it. Nor would you want to!

Monday

Just a few minutes ago, I said to Ed -- I am so sick of my life! And I meant it. He didn't bat an eye. In fact, I think he smiled a little over there, in the corner of the couch.

Of course, I'm not talking about my current life! Never that. What I am tired of is editing the book I've now (sort of) completed (is any writer ever done?), which has rehashed too many details of my childhood, with too many years spent in the writing of it all, and way too many edits and re-saves and new files opened and closed, because, well, you know, I'm never going to be totally satisfied with the thing.

I have started exploring the options that I have (very few) in terms of publication and distribution and this of course requires more reading, cutting, pasting, sending, consulting -- all about those damn childhood years that seem now comically childish because, well, at 68, I am wiser than I was, say, at 7. You try writing about your thought processes at maybe age 11. Classic tween stuff. See how good you feel about yourself when you put those years under a microscope.

At least when you blog as an adult, you dont worry too much about sounding immature, because in the here and now we always believe our heads are screwed on tight and our brains are functioning at full adult capacity. But way back then? Yes, I admit it, I really said that and sounded that juvenile! Earnest, but horribly young.

 

*     *     *

We have a chain of stunning days and I am deeply grateful for that Adirondack on the porch, otherwise, given all the writing I've been doing, I'd feel the beautiful weather will have passed me by. I do, of course, spend a handful of early morning hours in the flower fields. I think I snipped a record number of lily heads today, but somewhere in the middle of that project my thoughts drifted and suddenly I forgot if it was number 287 or 387 or maybe even 487, so I stopped counting and concentrated on whistling, which the cats and chickens find weird, but I'm not going to worry about pleasing them. Whistling is always gratifying, because it brings another layer of sensual joy to the rather repetitive work. But of course, the colors and the delicacy of each day-old bloom (against a backdrop of false sunflowers or purple phlox) are are the real stars for me. See if you don't agree.

With breakfast on the porch.

And then I stay on that porch and work. All day long, until, looking up, I saw a very pretty sunset. Worth greeting on a moped.

Goodnight sunset, goodnight prairie grasses everywhere!

 

a different kind of Sunday

We are capable of being weird with our schedules. Just because we tend to sleep at night and work during the day doesn't mean that we always have to proceed in this way. Similarly with dinner: if you think Sunday family meals necessarily take place on Sundays, well then consider this: why not move it around every now and then? Like for example this week: why not have Sunday dinner on, say, Tuesday?

And then there's the level of activity: on beautiful days (we are indeed having a beautiful day) Ed and I tend to be physically active. And indeed, I do spend a handful of early morning hours working in the flower fields and I supplement it with cleaning the house (one needs to clean occasionally, no?), but we don't do our usual: we don't hike, we don't bike, we don't boat, we don't go anywhere at all. Ed is designing new machining stuff and the guy always works in long spurts, usually in the middle of the night and so our schedule, if you can even call it that, looks exceptionally weird this weekend. Me, I seize this opportunity to work on the last sentences of my Great Writing Project. I dare say that by the end of the day I am sort of kind of done. Ish. But I wont admit to it because then you'll ask me -- now what? -- and I have no answer to that. 

So let's go back to the safe territory of the morning hours, where I am enjoying snipping away at (more than 600 today) spent lily heads and loving the morning colors in the flower fields. Take a look:

By the time I do as much as I want to do today, it is close to noon and Ed wakes up and joins me for breakfast. On the porch. Without chickens. Thank goodness.

And now comes the weird part where I take my laptop to my new chair on the porch and Ed sequesters himself with his big computer in the sheep shed and we work away on this gorgeous day without thought to anything else but moving our own projects along.

That means that you get no more than just this short post from me. I'm all out of words. But hey, you must admit that the flowers are gorgeous. Enjoy them! I surely did from my perch on the white Adirondack.