still life

It is remarkable how quiet the days can be in the summer and how terribly full they become after Labor Day.

Ed has a morning meeting and so I eat breakfast alone. Tomatoes! I need to attend to them: freeze some, put aside another set. Amazing how odd their shapes become as they grow!

Outside, the skies are gray. It may be raining again. I know it was drizzling when Isis came in in the middle of the night. Twice.

Wipe him down, please!

Yeah, okay, sure... what?

Rain. A good thing for the farmers around us.

 

I take papers to campus, dump them in my office and come back to an afternoon of errands with Ed. These are charming little escapades into the terrible world of big box stores. He drags me to Shopko because miniature planting roses are going for $1.29 each. It’s such a sweet gesture, even as in August, I’m all planted out. I bought my girlfriend roses, he tells the barista at Paul’s later.

Not for me! For your farmette!

No, for you.

Well alright. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear it. A note of sentimentality. But you have to really listen for it. 

I ask – do you want to eat dinner on the porch? Chicken brats, corn, a salad of garden tomatoes.

We play with my camera. I try to catch him when he’s not making gestures that don’t belong on a mellow blog. It’s not easy.

We move toward dusk calmly, happily, without reservations. And with chiken brats and tomatoes from the garden.

finding your way

A day or two ago: you want to go hiking and camping in the Black Hills?

Maybe.

(He continues to paint the house.)

Breakfast. You'll see the same images of a morning meal on the porch, though today Ed picks tomatoes and so we have those, too, to admire.

If you hear a note of desperation in that first question, you’re spot on. As August moves into its second half, I know my free days are very numbered. In the past, we’ve done a number of North American adventures in the summer. But this year a case could be made for just staying home. The weather is finally near perfect, we have almost no bugs (even as farmers down the road are having a hell of a time fighting them off; we rack our brains trying to understand what we’re doing right for two years in a row now and in the end, we figure it’s like the economy: too complicated for anyone to really understand and reliably manipulate into the future). 

Ed tells me – the tomatoes are ripening, your flowers are blooming, home is good now.

And yet, the man loves wilderness camping. I can sense the tug. Sill, I recoil once I figure out the driving time. Over thirteen hours each way on the highways. Many people have issues with flying. I have issues with spending the best part of any one day in a small box moving along a ribbon of asphalt.

We could listen to stuff. Make it fun.

So we should go?

Maybe not... it’s so nice here. Unless you want to camp?

Can we do two nights in a motel?

There’s no point in driving that far if we then spend time in a motel.

I do not see it that way. In an inspired flurry of morning activity, I had found a cheap cabin and in a surge of optimism, I booked a room. After hearing Ed's perspective, I unbook it and close all Internet tabs with promising South Dakota hiking trails. How is it that sometimes, Ed and I are so very compatible in our travel dreams and images. At other times, we are fermented in our own idiosyncratic preferences.

And so this too becomes a trip not taken.

Earlier, he had said – pick a place for dinner. Any place. I had noted that I’d been cooking daily, pretty much nonstop since our return from Europe. The man is asking me out on a date. I go for the whole banana: with a movie before that? (He knows that means a romantic comedy.) Okay, with a movie before that.

We eat at Lombardino’s, one of Madison’s good Italian places (by good, I mean that freshness matters to them).

And before, we see the movie Ruby Sparks. It’s a lovely film. And maybe you're thinking -- eh, it's not relevant to my bag of issues and foibles. Oh now, don't dismiss it that quickly. Will you agree that it is ever so wistfully sweet in suggesting that somewhere in the tangled mess that is life, you can find a good way to live with a person who is... very different than who you are and that that difference may be a good thing?

At dinner, we have the most wonderful pasta with seafoods...

...and at home I watch the end of the Olympics and I sob at the beautiful fiction that allowed us, for two weeks, to think of the world as a safe and caring place where good effort is enough to give you a chance to be who you want to be.



nasturtium from the garden

pics

May I just leave you with a few photos today? It's the kind of day where you don't need much more.

Breakfast. Fruits, yes, but mostly, it's about blueberries. In my mind, all that blueberry stuff is perfectly summerlike. Delightfully so.

Next stop – my daughter’s house. 

 

It's partway between the farmhouse and the downtown market. So I stop at her place, unload my bike and we finish the trip together, on bikes.

At the market – let’s look at the carrots and the flower sellers. Why? No reason. The colors are good.

After, my girl and I bike the twenty mile loop that takes us through prairie fields...

...and it is not terribly unusual to come across deer once you leave the city confines. Here’s a mommy deer with her young ones (or so we guess).

...and eventually we’re back in Madison, then in her place. I leave her there, returning to the farmhouse by myself.

Let's admire the new blooms that never ever show off their stuff before mid-August.

...and the old ones too, which would have to be the potted pansies that I put in... when, in March? Maybe April? They should have wilted and died once the season turned up the thermostat, but they’re still holding their heads high and I am so proud of their effort!

The day doesn’t end with a review of blooms. Ed and I play tennis, I spend hours on watering again, all that. But let me leave you with the old standby -- our farmhouse. This where I open the door and walk inside and think -- home. I'm home. This is where I exhale.

making noise

The middle of the night. It sounds like someone is rolling rocks across the wooden floor upstairs. Ed!

What? Go to sleep.

There’s some animal in this room!

Go to sleep.

Probably under the bed! I have never ever had the fear that there are monsters under my bed, but this time, I am convinced that we’re not alone up there: with us, there’s something with big claws. It’s not fast moving, but it is loud!

Please look under the bed!
No. Go to sleep. Probably Isis. Exploring.

No! Isis is right at this second standing in the doorway looking at us and wondering about the fuss.

Turn off the light.

My turn to say no. The “thing” hasn’t attacked Isis so I suppose I’m safe to look. I imagine gashes on my faces as the “thing” surely will lunge if I get too close. Ever so tentatively, keeping my hands off of the floor, I look down, below the bed.

Nothing.

Now will you please turn off the light?
I do, but the noise comes back. Okay, so it’s not under the bed. It’s in the wall, the attic, somewhere where there are boulders to roll around with claws.

How did it get in?
Through an opening. Ed can be very helpful, but not when you display anxiety about animals in the farmhouse in the middle of the night.

Eventually, the animal settles and we do too, but there are many hours in between and we spend them discussing houses, basements, attics – a whole “this old house” episode’s worth of talk, between 2 and 4 in the morning.

Friday. I wake to a reminder that the next season is fall. The day is crisp. Long pants weather. First time since we’ve returned from Europe. Do I like this return to cool? Do I? Well now, it’s not as if I get to decide.

farmer Lee, picking sunflowers for the market tomorrow

I go to my office for Part I of the annual great cleaning project. Today I throw away as much as possible. Thousands of pages of exams, papers, lectures for the shredder. Anything with dust on it. Out it goes. I have a small office and this forces choices. As I wheel my old chair from one end of the little room to the next, I think – this is a hell of a dysfunctional chair. It has no support. It is wobbly. I bought it, used, before I was even employed at the Law School (so more than two dozen years ago) and I took it with me to my office in part because I didn’t know what else to do with it. And it has stayed.

I’d grown jealous at seeing the proliferation of chairs that are actually kind to your back, chairs that can be adjusted this way and that and suddenly I think – I’m getting old. The back is to be protected. And so I ask the powers that be:

May I please have an office chair?

Instantly: Yes, of course.

That simple! For twenty years it never struck me that I could just ask!

Suddenly I am excited about the space on the bookshelf for the new semester, about the prospect of a functioning chair, about the coming of fall. For a little while, I accept the sudden slap and shake, telling me that a 'summer off' is just that – a 'summer off.' One season out of four.

In the late afternoon we resume our (suddenly precious) summer routines. At Paul’s café  I write and Ed naps.

rain and what follows

You need rain to remind you how good sunshine can be. (I know, you need it for other reasons too, but I’m taking the position of a person living on a mostly unproductive farm, so it’s all about how the weather affects us and our handful of growing things.) It’s our second day of rain. I write the manuscript during rainy days, but it’s a forced write. I sigh and sit down because going outside when it’s raining is pointless.

So I write. And I make progress and I’m thinking that these are the last writing days for me this year and maybe that’s a good thing because maybe I am just a summer season writer. And maybe that’s deliberate, so that I never have to release anything into the public domain, or at least not until I’m good and dead and I’ll avoid the whole people knocking on your door thing, telling you – it wasn’t like that, it wasn’t like what you wrote at all.

When you blog, you make many friends and you lose a few, but when you write and release a whole book of material all at once, I should think that you make very few friends and create a pool of disappointment so deep that perhaps you never quite recover.

So maybe I think about that when I choose, on sunny days, to step outside and work in the garden rather than working on my book.

But, today there was no garden work. Yes, there was breakfast on the porch...

...and a quick flower viewing – before the rain...

...and during a pause...

...and that was it.

Having stocked the fridge with so much food last week, I felt it wrong to suggest a trip to the grocer’s again, but in fact we’ve eaten the last leftover sandwich, the milk supply is low and the fruit – well, our hold looks like something we would have at the tail end of  winter season. Tomorrow. I'll restock tomorrow.

We do make it to Paul’s, despite the rain...

...and we go to the farmers’ market, despite the rain...

...and we even pop in to see my daughter, despite the rain...

Tomorrow we’ll play tennis and I’ll prune and pick beetles off of roses and zap mosquitoes with the zapper and chase hornets out of the mailbox. Unless it rains.

colors

It wasn’t supposed to rain today, but it did – that steady summer drizzle that we’ve been without for all of June, July and thus far August.

Before the first signs of rain, I went out to inspect the garden – a morning routine that has been far more pleasant now that the animals have stopped eating our flowers. For some reason it struck me to focus on what’s yellow right now. Coaxed and prodded by regular waterings, many plants are coming back with a brief rebloom. Here you go – the sweet gently yellow petals around me:

And then it turned gray and the drizzle came and I was glad I had that short walk earlier. The rest of the day was spent indoors.

Doing what? That stuff of life that is best spread out over many days (because it's tedious and dull) and not blogged about (because it's tedious and dull).

So during one of my many breaks, I was happy to see an article in the NYTimes on the virtues of Aperol Spritz (and Aperol in general; I’d written about it in the past, here). On a day like this, the dazzling colors are especially uplifting. Sort of like coming upon a lush oasis in an expanse of dusty sands.

I made one Spritz for myself at what I believe is Aperol sipping time in Italy. (Though actually, my recollection is that the proper time is anytime.)

I am confident that we will remain housebound for the rest of the day. A few minutes ago Ed said -- I’d take you out to dinner today but, one, maybe it’ll stop raining (he’ll be biking if it does) and, two, you’re probably full. I know I am...

Why is he full? Why would I be full at 4 in the afternoon? He’s been making us snacks of home grown tomato with melting cheese curds on top.





When I referenced cheese curds a few days back, one of my readers noted that she had to look them up. (She’s obviously not a Wisconsin girl.) She sent me the definition she had found :

“A cheese curd is an orangish cheese byproduct that feels like Silly Putty but tastes a lot better. It was invented accidentally by UW cheese scientists attempting to create an object of pure cholesterol that would still squeak. Rats who are fed this remarkable food develop an unusual capacity to polka and drink beer.”

Well now, I almost think that's right.

As I reread this post I come to the realization that there was absolutely nothing healthy about this day. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting that there was breakfast. Thank God for breakfast.

...but us chickens

My little one came, they came, they left, he came, they both left, then these came and the others too, but they left and now, this morning, the rest left as well.

Diane, at breakfast

Ernest, making garden tomato sandwiches for the road

There’s been a lot of movement at the farmhouse. My flowers were proudly on display.

But not anymore. Everyone's gone. I’m reminded of the 40s swing hit -- There ain’t nobody left but us chickens, there ain’t nobody here at all... (We don’t keep free range hens. Just the ones on the windowsill.)

Ed, too, has gone off on his Honda, to do work stuff across town.

It’s very quiet here right now. Even the farmers are gone for the day. Maybe it's too hot (again). Or maybe they just had to be somewhere else.

delightfully so

So here comes another delightfully sunny day (I can still say that, even though for many, all of this sunshine has been less than grand), still dry, still not too hot, perfect for a morning check of flowers (a touch misty eyed from the morning dew)...

 

...and a morning breakfast on the porch (here's Ed, because I like this particular photo).

 

My friends are still with us and we have the farmers pride of bringing out a big haul of ripe tomatoes – for dinner, yes and for freezing, but also for breakfast.

This is barely the beginning of the beginning... Ed says and I swear he’s beaming.

My friend and I go downtown. It's perfect. Down to the lake, along the lake path... campus at its quiet time. Not many summer classes now, not many people by the water's edge.

Then, a necessary stop at Paul’s, and a quick game of tennis with Ed, and now we're home and it's dinner time, but, almost to give meaning to the idea that summer is running out, Ed sets the big ladder against the farmhouse west wall. To finish the paint job begun last year. (Karma, my friends' dog, watches from inside, somewhat appalled.)

And finally, a dinner out on the porch...

...a walk out to our new orchard and the incredible, fantastic, over the top abundant tomato patch.

And if all this sounds terribly staid and a tad repetitive, I cannot tell you how much I like these easy days where the big decision has to do with which frozen yogurt to make – strawberry or blueberry? Let’s go with strawberry.