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.

Georgia

No no, I’m not really in Georgia. But anyone who was anywhere near Madison today would nod her or his head sympathetically. It was steamy warm – as you’d imagine the weather might right now in, say, Georgia.

It’s taking a while to sink in that I actually needn’t fly this Thursday morning to campus for an early morning class. I wake up, get up, recoil, go back to bed and doze blissfully into the late morning.

Breakfast – it might as well be brunch. At this late hour it feels so decadent, so incredibly indulgent. And because of Georgia out there, with pouty clouds that now and then release their heavy rains making it that much more steamy, we can eat out on the porch. Bare feet outside, bare anything in fact – arms, legs, you name it. Georgia.

I move from one clump of flowers to the next, feeding, clipping, assessing. That is my day.

And this week we remember our local market! It’s an afternoon affair and that makes it even more leisurely. Don’t need to rush at all, it’s barely starting when we show up after a café break at Paul’s.

Flowers, herbs and beautiful asparagus!

And our favorite bakery, La Baguette, is back this year! Could it be more French? She is making crepes, with nutella or jams or sugars, fresh crepes, spooned carefully onto the crepe maker and if that isn’t reason enough to make your way out here to the Fitchburg market, I don’t know what is.

Ed and I sit back for a while and watch. Warm air, the fragrance of something on the griddle, people moving slowly from one stand to another. Ed nibbles on a pain au chocolat, I occasionally lean over and steal a bite and we continue in this way until it seems too decadent, too overstepping our very loose boundaries of what must be done next.

Ed has an errand and I do as well. His is boring, mine – less so. Three perennials to pick up for the ever expanding beds. I walk between the tables at Johannsen’s Nursery...


 


...remembering when this store first began selling these hardy flowers and remembering, too, how carefully I planned my beds then – height, texture, bloom time – it all mattered. Now the beds are less articulated, less organized.

Back at the farmette, I pick weeds, take pots outside, clip off spent blooms, yes, the usual, until  it’s dinner time. It’ll be asparagus and eggs again, but this time, not out of a hurried indifference to food, but because the asparagus was there at the market, thin and freshly picked that day and eggs are a delicious accompaniment.

After, I take out the nasturtium seeds. You plant them after the danger of frost is past. It’s Georgia! Of course it’s past!

Ed and I work in the garden until there is no more light left. Dusk, made slightly brighter by the faint light of the moon...

Steamy Georgia hours. Slow, perfect and perfectly beautiful.

so many flowers, so little time

I’m trying to get the last lecture, a difficult lecture, a supremely difficult lecture together. Ed is firing off questions about a case, an out of the blue unrelated case that he is intensely curious about. I tell him – you’re a distraction!

It is often like that. Ed is a distraction. I like, nay, love working at home. But I have to work around the idea that Ed throws out queries and usually they are hard to ignore.

By the time I post this I’ll be officially after the spring semester and onto the summer months. My teaching will have ended, my need to wake up early, super super early will be behind me.

Dinner – I will have wiped clear traces of it. Washed plates and chopsticks, discarded boxes that once held the Chinese take out.

This spring, the story that I tell my students at the close of the semester is different from previous ones. I tell them about my grandmother and her insatiable desire to bring a smile to the faces of her two granddaughters. I don't look for stories to pass on. They come to me and when they do, I tell them.

At the end of the school year, I get in my law school mailbox a sprinkling of notes from kind hearted students. You may hear endless complaints about this generation of young people who know how to take and not once give back – let me tell you, so many of the ones I’ve come across know how to give back and then some. Today, I found in my mailbox one of the most beautifully written notes ever and I paused a great while to think – how is it that he found the time to do this, to want to share something positive with a random teacher in his law school years?

Law school is a funny place. You come with great expectations, you lose a good three years of your life and a hefty sum of money to get through it all and then you’re done and so often you don’t think back to what just happened. You’re done, for Pete’s sake, you’re done! Move on! Finally! Your spouse, girlfriend, cat, mother, father, all those who love you are so happy you’re out of there!

And I am too. I'm happy for you. But for one brief second, I remember the time you, the student said something incredibly endearing, risky, funny, clumsy, from the heart special and I think -- wow, I'm so sorry to see you leave and move on.

So I’m working hard tonight – I have to turn in exam questions by daybreak – but I’m also thinking about my grandma and her sticking a gift, her gift, actually nothing more than a bunch of frozen chicken breasts into my bag when last I visited her, just before she died. That’s all she had to give by then. Despite dementia, despite all that was wrong with her, she rambled over to her freezer and reached for those chicken breasts.

 There are some things that you just never forget.

fields of dreams

Time. The most valuable resource. I’d do a crazy busy schedule any day just to have what’s coming – a feeling of time. And space, so that when I look out, I see more than just what’s in front of my nose. It’s hard to look beyond your living room when you haven’t the time to venture further.

our farmer, working the fields down the road

Today was harried, tomorrow will be crazed, then will come a few days of normal and after that – time.

How is it that we, with our work ethic and endless growth obsession, never admit to how valuable, desirable, luxurious it is to have merely time? And I don’t mean time to do nothing (though if that’s your goal at the end of the day, then why not?). But time to be yourself in charge of the next hour and the one after? 

fields of growth, fields of future dreams

The neighbor across the road plants trees. Rows and rows of them. For your grandchildren, right? Ed teases him. (Rows of trees in fields of dandelions. To see him tend those trees is to know what it is to be content.)

Success, as measured by time. Pour resources into banking time.

Before it runs out on you.

for the birds

The last ever of the crazy Mondays. In a bold move, I bike to work. But I haven’t the time! Make time! I’m tired – Isis was at it all night long. Such excuses! Get going!

You know I haven’t the time to write tonight. But, don’t you think it's curious how I was not alone on the morning and then evening ride? How I was always in the company of these winged creatures? 

Beautiful birds. On, off water, watching, taking off. My escorts today.

Step aside deer. Not your turn. This last April moment is for the birds. 

Oh fine. You too.

growing things

Despite the chilliness in the air, Ed and I are ready to do some catch up work in the yard. For me, that means, finally, filling in some of the flower pots and putting in new ideas into the shadier portions of the garden.

It’s all about the entrance, I tell myself. How you enter your home sets the stage for how you feel once inside. So the path up to the front door (which is really the back door, but remains our main and only functional entrance) has to be aglow with welcoming blooms.

 

But I have to work around what’s already there. Tiger lilies to one side. A rhubarb plant that is out of control, producing far more rhubarb than any sane person is likely to want in her lifetime, let alone a summer season. And yes, I know about rhubarb pie and rhubarb compote and freezing rhubarb and I have bags of it still from last year, which surely indicates that we like rhubarb in theory, but have trouble understanding its usefulness, being less dessert inclined than the average rhubarb loving person out there.

And I have to work with cracking clay pots. Until they can no longer sustain their pot like shape, we keep them. Even if they look live been through a couple of cyclones and at least one major hurricane.

 

Come summertime, life, my life, our life is all about looking out at the world from behind the screens of the porch. That’s been an elusive thing thus far, since the burst of hot March air has been trampled over by its polar opposite. But the day will come when we will sit out there and admire all that’s growing just beyond the fine mesh. I think about that now, as I continue to plant.

Ed adds an extension to the raised flower bed, I put in 48 annuals into the clay pots (because that’s how many you can buy for $17.95 at Johannsen’s) and half a dozen remaining perennials elsewhere. Another batch of perennials will come from the east coast in a couple of weeks. Why I need to order perennials from Connecticut when we have, within a half dozen miles, enough perennials to fill every yard in Madison is beyond Ed, but tradition has it that I say my thanks to the place out east that pushed me to love perennials and so I buy some plants from the people at the White Flower Farm as well. Just a small batch. But I look forward to its arrival. 

So it continues, this wonderful protracted planting season. With pauses. To twiddle thumbs, listen to the sandhills, play with Isis. 

 

Things have settled down somewhat. Planting continues. And that’s a good thing.

different strokes

My mom sent a New Yorker clipping of an article on couch surfing.  Here’s what happens: you join an organization of couch surfers and you’re given a list of places where you can spend a night on someone’s couch. At no charge.

I tell her that not only had I already read that same piece (with amusement), but, in fact, Ed has been talking of couch surfing, house swapping and all things similar for years now. I've listened to him, but without great enthusiasm. My response to him has been -- There’s no free lunch! You’ll be reading a book and I’ll be left to make idle conversation with the lonely people of this world (by which I mean the hosts: why else would you otherwise put up with random strangers on your couch...). No thank you.

Today, Ed is at it again. He’s showing me another site – campinmygarden.com. The idea is the same, except you don’t stay on a couch, you pitch a tent, with access to bathrooms, sometimes kitchens, always with a beguiling green space for your overnight respite.

Here’s one in Italy! You like Italy! He brings up a link to someone’s beautiful garden, overlooking hills and olive groves. At about $15 per person it’s not exactly free, but nor is it up there with summer room rentals.

Next year maybe, I tell him, figuring that by then I’ll probably be in a wheelchair or otherwise incapacitated and he’ll have to reconsider. “Next year” has always felt, for me, like a long time away.

Ed counters -- When I finish building the writer’s shed, we could reciprocate. Have people stay there if they want to come to Madison, or go kayaking on the lakes.

I see where this is heading. I’m quickly becoming a b&b proprietor, only without the benefits of – well, income, for one thing.

I shake my head and say nothing more. Time is always on my side. Ed doesn’t finish projects quickly. There’s still a dormer of the farmhouse that is pinkish brown instead of Caribbean yellow.

It was a cold Saturday. Ed and I filled cupboards with Woodman’s groceries. He noted that I wasn’t smiling much. He was right.

Even so, I have never known Ed to lay claim on me, my mood, my preoccupations. He has never objected to days like this – when I spend a significant chunk of time trying to ascertain how someone else, not him, but someone else is getting along. If I had to scoot down to help a person from my past, he’d help me figure out how best to do it.

Later in the day, Ed and I sit at the lemon-draped kitchen table and I tell him -- thank you. And, too, for letting me do what I have to do, for letting me write about him, here on Ocean. Ed has had to adjust from being a completely private guy, more so than perhaps anyone else I know, to being part of my story here.

He munches his prepared by me peanut butter sandwich and says – don’t you think these are all small things? What you said, whom you described on Ocean – when we’re dead and gone, will it make anything worse for anyone? No? Then stop fretting and write what you want to write.

Out of eight years of blogging, only three times have I agreed to reword a post upon someone’s request. I did it earlier today. I’m thinking unless I make a gross error or cause someone great harm, I’ll never do that again.

thoughts

Friday mornings Ed goes off. Call it a work day. Tech meetings, business meetings – compressed into this one day at the place of his business venture.

Soon Fridays will be, for me, no different from any other days. Classes end this coming week and my trips to campus thereafter will trickle down to few and far between. I took a pay cut and stopped working summers last year and it was the best decision I ever made. After exam grading, the summer months are my own.

But today still blends with my class days and my thoughts glide back and forth between work, non work, and all things in between.

When I wrote my first post on Ocean, now more than eight years ago, my then husband asked me to consider not writing about, for example, him. Not an uncommon request. People don’t like being described by others. The writers often get it wrong, even as, arguably, they are not writing about another, they are writing, in a roundabout way, about themselves.

When I was in the thick of my divorce, many Ocean readers did not even know I was going through a divorce. That couldn’t happen in the more modern incarnation of Ocean. I no longer avoid the difficult topics, even as I don’t tend to dwell on them.

I tell myself someday I will dwell on them, putting the perspective I often find missing when people recount drama in their lives. Someday. When I learn to trust my own instincts as to what is right for Ocean.

But, for now, the “take charge” impulse that always, always pushes me forward has me in the garden today and I attack the raspberry patch with zest. I don’t want order, I don’t want neatness, I just want to clip and remove spent growth because it’s too ghostly in there among twigs that no longer want to sustain life.

In the morning, at least there are rays of sun.

In the afternoon, skies are gray.

I huddle indoors with my computer and think about how you can never avoid the twists and turns in life and then I stop thinking about it all and turn my attention to thoughts of summer and ferns unfurling, etc etc.

beauty

An email pops into my mailbox: the countdown begins! Your classmates, teachers (and sundry others) will be coming together on May 4^th! It’s an invitation to take part.

But here’s the thing. I went to grade school at UNIS – the United Nations International School in New York. This is a reunion of our lot. But my classmates wont be there! They’re scattered in all parts of the world. They come from faraway and they return to faraway.

And here’s the other thing about elementary school reunions: they should not suggest that I’ll be among my pals and teachers too. My teachers are likely dead. Or with dementia. My favorite teacher (math, from Denmark, Mr Rydstrom) was forty when I was eleven. Do the arithmetic. That would make him now 88. At best he is at a pleasant retirement home overlooking the North Sea doing sudoku. No way will he be at the reunion.

We are almost in May. Yet, when I biked to work, the cold wind knocked me around so much that I explained to my morning class that at least at the outset, I could not see them. My eyes were glazed over – and this from a person who always wears glasses.

May (and I know we’re not actually in May, but close enough) – it’s a peculiar month. It’s dealt me some punches. May – the month of near death in infancy, the month of major surgery at age 12, at age 21, at age 24 (indeed, I have had no surgeries outside of that month), the month of my brain hemorrhage, the month of break up, of a friend’s death, of weird acting out, of lust, of greed, of wanting.

May’s a regular bell ringer!

I’m calmer now. It takes a bit more to rile me.

Today (true, it’s April still) I come home tired. I had biked to work, there’s that.

   

It’s the end of the teaching week – there’s that as well.
 

At the farmette, I plant, pull, and then, exhausted,  I fall back on the couch and Ed and I eat scrambled eggs for dinner. True, with asparagus, but still – eggs. I worry that  it is a mark of inspirational decline.

On the upside, I pour an Aperol spritz into a tall glass and watch it disappear. How so? Well, Ed, who dislikes most any alcoholic beverage (except the once a month dark beer) took to this bitter orange fizzy concoction like someone raised on it. Weird.

I love this time of the year, of life, of dreamy expectations. But there’s a challenge to love. I’m well aware of it.

Such a complicated existence this is. No wonder Voltaire stood committed to growing one’s garden. It is an “extraordinarily effective way to keep busy.”

shift focus

This afternoon I was in such a hurry that I banged the nonexistent front fender of the red hot lover on the parking garage cement post. The tape that is on the car, hiding the fact that it doesn’t really have fenders, was torn to shreds. The beauty of having a terribly ugly old car is that you don’t care about any of this. When I park the car next to Ed’s truck, I routinely let the door swing open so that it bangs into the pickup. It’s a very satisfying sound.

I know what made this an especially edgy day – I was tired. Isis decided to spend the night in and out of the farmhouse. Happy to sit on the couch with us. Restless once we retired. Wants to go out. Wants to come back in. Out. In. And so on, all night long. (The cat door would solve all Isis issues, but I resist it nonetheless. For many reasons.)

Late in the day, at Paul’s café, I contemplate taking a nap. No. It’s my email catch up time. I cannot.

But when we finally come back to the farmhouse, I know I need to let go of it all. Ed takes off to ride his Wednesday Night bike ride and I lose myself in the flower beds. Dig this weed out, move that plant over, scratch the earth, stomp the soil – finally, relief!

An hour later, I feel whole again.

I look around me with the older camera in hand. Yes, this is the last of early spring. 

The last of the lilac season. Let me frame the farmhouse one last time in its majestic purple.

What’s the sequence? Which plants bloom next, after the bulbs, the fruits and the lilacs? There’s always a bit of mystery to it. No matter how many spring seasons you’ve gone through, you can never quite predict what’s next.

Maybe the lilies of the valley?

Maybe.

I go inside and reheat the vegetable soup. Ed will say it's always best the second day. Like spring, like flowers, like anything else that feels good. It feels even better the second day.

growing things

There’s a time when I think cursing is permissible, indeed, warranted. For example, when your hours of work are on a day that promises sunshine, gentle breezes and that perfect spring combination of cool and warm. And here’s where you can really sound off – when you read that by the time you get to your days off on the weekend, the sun will disappear, the rains will come and the deep chill will set in. I mean, really?

After work, Ed and I meet at Paul’s and that's fine, quite nice in fact, but I am depleted. You could say that the high point of the work day had been bringing coffee cakes from Florida to one of my classes. (Each of my classes has had a treat moment – this was the day to honor the morning bunch.)

It's early evening. I tell Ed we should be going home and putting in the last of the blueberries. The rains are coming. We want everything to have a home by the time the soil turns to clayish mud.

We make our way home. 

Huh?  What’s that?

We see the Dan truck (Dan is our guy with the heavy machinery that will transform every deranged acre of weeds into usable land), and the telltale white van belonging to Lee (she’s the truck farmer working the fields across the road), right there at the farmette.

Well now!

Dan has plowed the field out back and now he’s rototilling it. Lee is standing, hands on hips, keeping an eye on things.

We have a resolution! It's done now. For better, for worse, we've embarked on this farming project and now we have tilled land and an orchard sprouting buds and it all feels very right, very fitting. 

Dan’s an affable guy and if you hire him to do your tilling (and you should, he’ll haul that piece of machinery over land that I swear looks like no good thing could ever grown there and make it look suddenly farmable)...

...you’ll hear a few jokes, a story (or two), and you may get a grandchild (or two) accompanying him and it all makes you feel deeply satisfied – as if you’ve finally figured out where those missing puzzle pieces are and now you’re on a good track, doing something that adds value – perhaps not to your land, but surely to humankind. Last I heard, there’ll be an acre of cucumbers growing there for Wisconsin farmers' markets. Or was it beans? Or strawberries? It’s in Lee’s hands now. We stay out of this part of farming.

But we don’t stay out of our own plots and plans. We put in two more blueberries this evening and we'll transplant three others to our newly forming blueberry patch. Ed’s bringing in something to mix into the soil – to make it more blueberry friendly, as it were.

Where did you get that? – I ask.

Oh, well, you know.

Ed, how old is that bag of..whatever?

Sulfur. It's agricultural sulfur. Maybe ten twelve years...

You think it’s still potent?

Look at it!
That tells me nothing at all.

You know we should have improved the soil months, many months before putting these blueberries in...

Would that have changed our planting habits?

Maybe you shouldn't admit on your blog that we planted blueberries. My meter tells me we're still at pH 7 (an unacceptable level for blueberries).

I’m smiling at this exchange. So Ed. So me.

Night time. I make soup. Vegetables. Onion, garlic, cabbage. Mushrooms, carrots, parsnips. Frozen tomatoes from last year’s garden. Frozen corn from last year’s market.

It’s as if I can’t even remember how horribly tired I am from 48 hours of tough work demands.