overdone

Maybe it's having spring thoughts that spurs the clean-up machine within me. Or maybe it's that I'd been lax with my weekly scrubbing and I was beginning to notice the effects of that. Or maybe it's because I took out all the cleaning paraphernalia from underneath the kitchen sink and that prompted me to get serious and use it all today.

I don't really understand why there are people (like me) who insist on overdoing once they start something (just as I had overdone it yesterday with so much effort put into a failed project! Not my fault there, by the way. The website I was working with refused to load...), but there you have it, I belong to those who plunge, full speed forward and then, much much later, sit back and study the damages.

Today's cleaning extravaganza resulted in a very sore lower back and a very clean everything else. Including the basement. Because yes, we even attacked that -- me, vacuuming cobwebs from the rafters and a year of dust from the floor, Ed tidying shelves of whatever stuff he wont store elsewhere.

So please forgive this post: it is what it is. We did little else today.

Well, unless you want to consider the breakfast. Front room today. (With my sweet guy, with his oddly broken pinkie finger and a shirt that should have been retired decades ago.)






And, too, I can give you yet another photo of the farmhouse, from it's less photographed side -- the one that actually faces the street. (You can't see its original front entrance, because it's behind trees and besides, it is in a sad state of disrepair and Ed has little interest in fixing it. His reasons are irrelevant and unconvincing but there you have it).





We had gone out that way, toward the cluster of neighbors (we have a few, but we are separated by more than fields -- we are isolates, all of us and we rarely (never?) knock on each others doors so today is a milestone). We were distributing information about a town meeting this coming Tuesday. Oddly enough we belong to a town, even though that town along with any commercial point is really miles away. We plan on attending the meeting we want to encourage others to attend. There are rumors of a development that may someday (soon?) replace the fields where farmer Lee and her extended family now grow market produce. There are many reasons why a development here, now, is not a good idea (and they are not only NIMBY reasons). So there we were, going door to door -- a most unusual activity for the two of us.

How come you hate this so much? -- he asks, after I wince at the prospect of yet another house.
I have to be friendly.
You don't like being friendly?
I don't like failing at being friendly.


In the evening Isis is a little under the weather. Ed works on an engineering project I cannot begin to understand. Supper is simple, the evening is too short. I watch a movie about young love. ("Like Crazy.") Sad. But then, when is young love anything but sad?  Or is it that it has to be sad before the good years come spilling forth?

Day ends, house is clean. Ready for the week ahead. And that's a good thing.

Saturday

Today I learned patience. I spent seven hours on a project that ultimately failed. I'd let you know what it was, but, in the spirit of forgetting failures and forging ahead with success, I'll let it go for now.

So tonight we watch a more than mildly depressing movie -- "the human resources manager" -- an Israeli film about... well, death and family and a little bit of Rumania thrown in (which, in this movie, reminds me of Poland twenty years ago).

And you'd think this would make for a dismal day. Well no.

There was early morning yoga.

And mid morning breakfast.





And much later, I stepped outside to see if the opossum had eaten the ginger cookies we'd left out for him.

He hadn't.

But there was a break in the clouds and even though it was cold, it felt very pre-spring.





So let's stay with that image. Of forming buds, of melting snows and of successful projects. To be here tomorrow. Or soon after.

counting

A few math problems for you, to keep your brain cells sharp:

First of all, if Isis spends 80% of the day napping and Ed spends about half as much time at napping, how many wakeful hours do I have with either one of them? (Assume I sleep about 7 hours per night and that my sleep hours overlap with Ed and that I work for the better part of the time before dinner.)

Second question: how many photos of breakfast did I take to finally end up with these -- of a breakfast partially set...





...and of a breakfast ready to be consumed by my breakfast companion (who is really into his Toasty-Os lately)? [5]





Next: if, in the last twenty or so years I have never owed additional taxes on April 15th, what are the chances that I'd owe this year?

I'll give you the answer to the last as it's fresh in my mind, having completed my tax returns just today: 100%. It has something to do with no longer claiming deductions. I don't really object to taxes in principle, but I do object to being surprised, nay, shocked by a bill for anything that exceeds $100 and yes, my liability exceeds $100. So that's a bummer.

I offered this deal to Ed: I would chip away the ice on the path to the sheep shed in exchange for him picking up my tax liability. He politely declined.

Still, it is a sunny (coldly so!) day and as I walk the farmette lands to lift from my shoulders the preoccupation with the almighty dollar, I think how it really is so very sublime when the winter sun has finished three-fourths of its journey across the great Midwestern sky.
















At home, the sun lingers on the bouquet of colorful rose buds and this, too, is such a fine moment that I nearly forget about all those math computations.






Just one more arithmetic query then: how many suppers can I make out of one head of cabbage? Especially if I supplement it with salads with roasted beets, just to put some color into the package? [3]

Valentine

I asked in my classes today if anyone really truly liked Valentine's Day. I was thinking that maybe women would say yes, men would say no. (I personally do not know many women who hate this day and many men who absolutely love it.) The show of hands surprised me. (It was mixed.)

And so I pushed it a little: why do you like it, I ask. I admit that I, too, like it, even though I don't really understand why. I'm not usually one for Hallmark holidays.

Because it's a reminder to do something with your loved one...

Because it's February. The south has Mardi Gras. What do we have?

Why? Why not?

Chocolate!


So maybe this is why I wake up and the first words I say are Happy Valentine's Day Ed, even though he is really, really not into Hallmark holidays.

I pout and I groan when I see that I am not going to engage him in this. This is our eighth Valentine's Day together - you'd think I'd know better. Conventional expressions are not ever the most important expressions of love or caring.

At the same time that Ed comes to back down on such trivials as chocolates and flowers. Get your self some after work, he tells me. We so often do meet each other at a good halfway point in life.



We eat breakfast. A beautiful, calm meal. Happy red heart day!







Many many hours later, the work day comes to a close. I go to the cupcake store on State Street and I am thrilled, really thrilled to see that they now have begun to make these:





Yes, definitely a few of those to take home.

Where would be be without bakeries! On this day, they are the best at giving you ideas on how to convey adoration to your beloved.





Lovely ways, with pink and red frosting on top.






A long long time ago, when we were first together, Ed would occasionally bring over prepackaged bouquets of little roses. He'd pick them up at the grocery store along with the needed quart of milk or dozen eggs. When I saw a version of such a bouquet at Whole Foods this evening, I knew that fate had spoken: these should come home with me. Along with a small box of chocolates. Silly things, to be sure. Or, maybe not silly at all.






...even if I really don't need such conventions to tell me that my days with Ed are rich indeed.






Dinnertime. Ed scoots down to our newly discovered Thai place. We opt to have take out for dinner because it's so lovely to stay home after a long day away from home.





I'll say Happy Valentine's Day one more time in a few minutes and maybe now they will finally be genuine words of affect, without a question mark, without that reminder that something should follow. Words of gratitude, certainly that. An expression of caring, tied not to Hallmark, nor to a midwinter day, tied to nothing at all but this silly feeling of love and bubbly mirth and all those fine things that we sometimes take for granted and today remember not to take for granted.

So Happy Valentine's Day. Yeah. I really do like this mushy, blushing little day stuck in the middle of a winter month. A day celebrating love. What an utterly brilliant idea!

consider the peppers

A pretty interlude. Not a gorgeous day, not one that screams beauty at you, but one that lifts up your heart just a tiny bit.

I wake up to sunshine...





... and of course, that calls for breakfast in the sun room. And here, I want to show off something on the sill of that room -- there is the Christmas Cactus which, irrationally blooms in months that have nothing at all to do with Christmas. And there is the pepper plant. This guy was sown from seed last spring. When we slipped into the fall season and frost became a danger, I pulled out the pepper plant (which had yet to produce a single pepper), packed it into a pot and carried it indoors. Why not. And sometime in the winter it bore two peppers and they have been hanging in there for months now. Delightful as they are, we cannot decide if we should eat the peppers or keep them on the plant, as mementos of a better time (weatherwise).






Okay, okay. Breakfast. A variation on the usual, but in the beauty of sunshine.










Late, much much later, after work, I drive home by way of the isthmus lakes. Where you can still find a solitary ice fisherman waiting for a fish.






I'm heading home. The sun is still with me. Faint now, but still there, letting me admire that  great and magnificent evening sky...






The paths around the farmette aren't entirely free of ice yet and so I help them along, using a sturdy shovel to chip away frozen (but softly so) surfaces. Just to bring us that much closer to... spring.





I'm thinking of spring now. Every single day, it's on my mind. Even though I've got a chunk of life to confront before that.

a Tuesday...

A Tuesday in the middle of February.


 


Don't hold me accountable for the text here: my thoughts wander on days like this. To the past, to the future. Just not to Tuesday in the middle of February.

It is for this reason that I'm bugging Ed incessantly about Valentine's Day. (That's a Thursday, unfortunately even busier than a Tuesday and still in the middle of February.) I tell him how he must make plans for it, how chocolates and champagne are never wrong, I tell him all this, though not with the expectation of observing Valentine's Day. It's merely my way of being grumpy. As in -- if this is all that February has for us, can't we at least go along?

This morning is busy, this afternoon -- busier. Sometime, the sun comes out and I ought to take note of that because I love sunny days so much, except on this sunny day I can only observe from within.

On the way home, it seems to me that the world is suspended -- between winter and non-winter, snow and not snow...





...satisfying no one at all.

In other news, we talk again about raising goats and chickens and other farmish things and though these discussions never go anywhere, they make us feel like we are being true to the land around us.

On the upside, the sun set significantly after 5.










...and I made thick cabbage soup. With turkey sausage. (Our meals seem both strange and predictable.)

wild things

Anyone who is predisposed against farm living ought not keep reading. There's too much of the rural stuff. Too much of stray animals and their perverse habitats.

There's too much of the wild, the uninvited.

It starts in the predawn hours, when I hear the telltale thrashing of the mouse trap downstairs.
Ed!
Sh, go to sleep.
I know we have another catch. And that I will be the one looking for a field in which to set this brat free. Ed's the stay at home guy now. I go to work, releasing mice along the way.

Farmhouse living. We eat breakfast at the kitchen table.


 


We talk about how the weather people had miscalled the temperatures. Above freezing turned below freezing. We have a sheet of ice on the driveway. Ed stands ready to push me and the donkey car out onto the road.

But as I leave, I spot the intruder.

The intruder was around last night. Isis and he exchanged stares for a minute and then the cat retreaded. Maybe because the intruder has very large, sharp teeth. Or maybe because they know each other. The intruder appears to be living beneath the writer's shed. He comes out to hunt for food in the makeshift compost pile that we keep by the garage during winter months.





'Possum. In the south, people cook them. Our region is as far north as these guys go. No one cooks opossum here. We leave them alone, they leave us alone.





Sorry to interrupt your breakfast, Mr 'possum. Go hang out with your family now.

I take the trapped mouse and head to campus. I pass cornfields, rather submerged right now...





Canadian geese love it here. We're less in love with them. They multiply faster than rabbits (it seems) and they squawk at you if you get too near. And, worst of all, they leave behind many tons of poop.

I stop at a snow covered prairie field and let the mouse out.





He looks at me defiantly and scampers off toward a plant hole, disappearing somewhere in the snow.

In the evening, back at the farmhouse, Ed reads me passages from a book written by a woman (Jennifer Reese) who took to raising chickens, bees, ducks, against all odds -- against intruders who invented clever ways to get into the fenced off areas and raid them for her birds. She never gives up, building bigger and better (meaning more expensive) enclosures and I laugh at these stories appreciatively, as if this was my fate too -- protecting Isis, protecting the warm spaces inside the farmhouse from the wild things that roam the farmette fields.

indoors

All good things today took place indoors. Why? Well, outside, it was like this:





So, back to the indoors. Breakfast at a coffee shop, with my good, good friend who happened to be in town for just a few short days.





Then, drip drip drip, rain falls steadily, I don't want to go out anymore, I do not want to go out.

Still, yoga with my yoga buddy... I wont say no to that. No photo there, though I do offer this comment: the class is a long one: two hours, combining music, meditation and the usual vinyasa practice. I should have felt the inner peace that all participants seemed to experience. Instead, I kept thinking that somehow, when nature gave out genes, she did not give me one that made me amenable to group meditation, religion, or spiritual enlightenment. As the musicians chanted site ram, site ram, site ram ram, all I could think was -- I wonder how you spell that...

And when the entire room burst into many rounds of may all *beings* be happy and free, may all things be... -- I listened carefully to see who was singing "beasts" instead of "beings." As if it mattered. And it's not as if I don't wish all beings and beasts happiness (except perhaps for mosquitoes, but I don't really think count) and yet I got no inner tranquility from singing about it with two dozen others.

Still, I am a yoga-in-smaller-doses fan. I cannot imagine becoming one of those older women who can twist herself into unlikely contortions because she does this so often that it becomes second nature. But I do love, really love the hour that I can take every few days to stretch and to exhale, so I'll stay with that attitude and not mind that occasionally, I am asked to reach for something more.


There is one more good indoor element to this day and it is Sunday dinner with my older girl and her husband. The store had monkfish for sale. Good with potatoes, prosciutto, tomato, capers...





And so we eat that, albeit not around the table, but on couches, keeping an eye toward the music that is coming at us from the Grammy Awards. Listening to music with people who know it and like it is always better than listening to it alone and so I have a wonderful handful of hours paying attention to what's cool out there. 





Outside, it rained a crazy wet February rain, turning snow into slush and icicles into wet daggers that fell on anything and anyone who'd dare walk underneath a farmhouse dormer. Wham! Down goes another. And another. No respect for beasts or beings whatsoever.

Let's hope the rest of February brings in gentle days. Snow's okay. Sunshine would be sublime. I'll look for it. Tomorrow maybe?

up north, one more time

Several points.

Up north, they don't run away from the cold. This morning, downtown Wausau was abuzz.





Second point: if you stay at a place that is not a b&b then you have to fend for yourself if you're looking for protein in the morning meal. I look up on the Internet where Wausau people go for breakfast. Mint Cafe. Okay. We go there.





Eggs and blueberry pancakes for me. I know I'm in for a long run today. I need a solid morning meal.


We're on the trails (at Nine Mile Park) by 11:30. So one more point: the weather people tell us it will be a dry day. They are wrong: light snow accompanies us for all the time we are out on the trails.






I have to admit that we are the more laid back skiers. Unlike us, sportspeople at Nine Mile take their skiing seriously. Most everyone passes us -- we are too pokey, too not dressed for the part. (Compare us to him: color coordinated no less.)







Did I mention that today's run is the same one we did last year? It's the 20K and from what I read here on the blog, it took us nearly 5 hours to complete it then.






Will we find it harder now that we're a year older? Will it demonstrate our fitness? Out unfitness?

We have small bottles of water, but these empty out fast. After, we replenish them with fresh snow.
Why doesn't it melt in the water?? What's wrong with this snow?? I expect no answer. I leave for you the most basic Qs about life, skiing, and the ways of frozen slush.


Halfway through the 20K Ed tells me we ought to rewax. Okay. A pause. I welcome a brief respite. There are a handful of shelters on the 20K. It feels so fine to be out of the wind for just a few minutes.





The snow keeps falling, the wind picks up a bit.


 


My cheeks grow very red.





Ed's beard ices over.







Twenty kilometers. This year we do it in 4.5.  At least we're not rapidly declining into some permanent state of disrepair.






Or are we? It's dark on the drive home. I'm at the wheel and I realize that that ribbon of highway is hard to pick out at times. I slow down. Ed looks at me -- are you alright?
I remember so many trips across the country where I was the driver, where I would push forward at all hours, wanting so much to get there. Apparently that's a thing of the past. For me anyway. I pull over at a rest spot. You drive -- I tell the ever up for a challenge Ed. He loves the dark hours. I'll always prefer good visibility. Clarity. Light.

Sometimes it's good to have various and even incompatible talents.


We pull into the farmhouse driveway with a pizza picked up at our beloved Roman Candle.

You didn't fall once today, I tell Ed.
You made it without losing anything, he responds.

 Isis runs over to the farmhouse the minute he spots headlights in the driveway. Where have you been - he seems to be asking, not without accusation.

Up north. Where the wild things roam, I tell him.

P.S. to Up North

Ocean readers with young children, you have no excuse!

Up north (or, for us Madisonians it's up north!), the whole family takes to the trails!