oh oh

Rain. Good. Work time. Indoor time. While the flowers and plants outside thrive.






Well, maybe.

Let's start at the beginning. Breakfast indoors, in the front room. Very leisurely. Neither of us feels compelled to rush.











I go outside just for a minute. The rain is almost almost upon us. You feel the wetness in the air.






Appointments, work -- time slogs on. From hyper physical exertion of the past days, I switch to sitting still most of the hours of the day. (Yuk.)

In the late afternoon, we go to the Fitchburg Farmer's Market. It's cold and the rain is coming down hard. Not many farmers show up. Not many shoppers either. But our asparagus farmer is there and her asparagus is fresh and suddenly the market is transformed into a place of hope.





For a while anyway. Later, the day returned to being one of worry. We're preparing for Saturday and Sunday nights -- both will bring the temps into the thirties -- far too low to sustain a tomato crop. Now, you may tell me -- cover your plants! That's easy if you have five. Or fifteen. We've got a good seventy tomato plants out there, so we have to be creative!
Ed, this is your task; You pick the strategy, I'll help you implement it.
I'm on it!

In other news, our replacement cherry trees  arrived, my winter order of bulk perennials arrived -- all are sitting out on the proch waiting for kinder gentler times.

Ed and I have a lot of garden work in the week ahead. And that's a VERY good thing.

the daffs have it

There's so much more to these days than just the daffodils, glorious as they are. But, I stayed up late to post last night, got up early to plant and weed this morning and so I am now without oomph.

Much of this post will be, therefore, about daffodils.

With the occasional shot of Ed thrown in. Like at breakfast.







Oh! In this next photo of the entrance to the farmhouse -- you're not noticing the daffodils either. I've reconceptualized the perennial borders here. The plantings  have to be responsive to their environment: very little sunlight filters in once the trees have full leaf cover. In anticipation of the spring overhaul, I did not plant many daffodils here last fall.





This border -- not finished yet! -- was perhaps the hardest of them all for me this spring. Fabric, overgrown with weeds had to be dug up and removed, without disturbing the roots of the few flowers I would leave behind. Successful? Well, if you allow yourself to let go of the occasional casualty, then yes. Next year I'll let you know if the new plantings were suitable for the fickle lighting here.

In other spots at the farmette, the daffodils -- singles, doubles, white, orange, cream --  they rule in May.






So magnificent. And unpredictable, too. Here are some random stalks that tipped over in the bad weather of ... whenever it was that we last had bad weather. I cut them down and put them in my little vase.





Tomorrow, my digging, pruning, transplanting -- all pause as a cold front moves through. That's okay. I can admire spring from inside. I can catch up with written work, I can hatch plans for the next stage of this planting mania.  In the meantime, take in the daffodils and remind yourself how not that long ago, there was no sign of spring, of blooms, of all the beautiful pale yellow, orange, white that we see today.

It's a remarkable world out there. Even as now, it seems that it's all about the daffodils.

Polishness

Our nocturnal cat stretched, meowed, meowed again. A sign that he wants to walk the land. At 4:20 a.m. No matter. It's dark still, but there are slivers of light out over the fields to the east.





In any case, I need to be up and out of here. The 5 a.m. bus will put me at the Chicago airport at 8:25. From there, slightly less than an hour  on the elevated subway and I'm in downtown Chicago. Finally, a fifty minute brisk saunter should put me on the steps of the Polish Consulate. [A reminder: I am there to confirm that, despite lapses in documentation, I am still a dual: meaning I have not relinquished my Polish citizenship.]

It's a beautiful day to be walking from one end of the city to the next.





But I can't pause much. I must be on time for my meeting with the Polish Counsel.


 


Let me tell you straight away that he and I were not going to get along. Which is saying a lot, because if you are at the mercy of someone, a bureaucrat lo less, you make an effort to get along. At least I do. Kissing up to the men and women of a papered world is, in general, not a bad strategy.

But Mr. Counsel would have none of it. During the hour that we talked, he allowed for no interruptions, explanations or clarifications. He was hell bent on telling me, in as many words as possible, what a total mess I've made of my life.

I have to say that I felt slightly put upon by the process from the get go. I have a Polish passport. It has expired, but it's there. I have a government ID as well. So why, in my quest for a renewal, start from the beginning? Why ask for a birth certificate? Why a twelve page form demanding such essential information as my great grandmother's maiden name? Who is going to check this and for what reason?

Mr. Counsel looks at my forms, my papers. My oh my, this is a very complicated matter! -- he tells me. I smell pleasure in his voice.
Why?
Well now, let's go back in time. You say you married. Do you have a Polish certificate attesting to that?
No! I married an American. Here in Chicago!
And you didn't register this marriage in Poland? -- he asks, amazed.
But...
Let me finish. You did not do it. Well, you must do it. And look at your Polish passport! It's full of inconsistencies! You tell me your last name is Camic. Why is it Camic-Lewandowska in your passport?
I really don't know...
Well, you'll have to explain that down the road.
My Polish passport was issued after my marriage. But okay. I did not register my marriage. Can I now submit my marriage certificate? 
No. It has no information as to why your name appears hyphenated in one place and not that way in another. And besides, you can't submit anything without proper certification.
But this is the original marriage certificate!
He smiles indulgently. You must certify it nonetheless.

Fine, I get that. International treaties. Certifications. Stamps. Signatures. All that. So I'll certify it! 
Not enough. You must then register it in Poland.
I'm not even married anymore!
I see that. You have been negligent in that as well. You must certify, then register your divorce too. Only after you do that can you file papers asking for a verdict as to your citizenship. If they say yes, then you'll be issued a new ID. And then you can apply for a passport. But I don't know how you can explain the incorrect name... He seems genuinely concerned at this point that he can offer no steps for me to follow.
A very complicated case, he summarizes. This is going to take a very, very long time.

I feel a tightness in my throat. It comes to me when someone slaps down my earnestness, my hope for a good outcome.

And then I have a moment of utter clarity: it doesn't matter anymore. My happiness does not depend on this man's support or disapproval. He has no control over the joy I feel when working at the farmette, or when I teach a good class, or when I eat a meal with daughters and their partners, or when I eat breakfast with Ed. I am so incredibly lucky -- none of these things rest on his decision or his smug disapproval of the steps I have taken in my life.

And so I smile, because this realization makes me very, very happy! And I tell him that much as I like being in Chicago on a sunny May day, I do not want to make a habit of making the trip, five, ten or perhaps more times in the next years to secure the proper stamps and signatures. So I'll pursue my Polishness elsewhere, on my own, with the help of my sister, directly in Warsaw.

No you wont! You can't! You do not live in Poland! -- he really wants to squelch any last bubble of hope. We, at the Consulate, we are your representatives! I'm sorry you don't feel happy with the service we are providing.
I don't like inefficiencies, I say, still smiling. I don't need him for a good life! How cool (and lucky) is that! If every American had to make a personal appearance and go through these steps to get a passport renewal, there would not be enough tax dollars in the Treasury to pay for it.

Oh, he tells me, as if in cahoots with all government bureaucrats of the world -- it's coming to that here too! You'll see!
Let's hope not, I tell him and walk out.

At the clerk's booth I do get a "certified" photo copy of my American passport. I need that to initiate the Polishness process on my own, in Warsaw.
That'll be $40 please, smiles the rather pleasant (for a change) Polish clerk.

So they sucked some money out of me after all, but they didn't slap me down and throw me to the wolves. Not yet anyway. Stay tuned.


My little girl, the one who lives and works in Chicago breaks away from her job to eat lunch with me.





It's been a while since I've had the great pleasure of a Chicago meal with her. 


I manage, too, to squeeze in a trip to the office where people certify various Illinois documents (my marriage certificate came from Illinois). I just want to see if perhaps I am too harsh in finding fault with the consular office that charged me $40 for the passport certification.

How much? I ask, as I pick up the certificate, admiring the gold seal that has now been added.
$2.
Huh.

The bus ride back to Madison is smooth, pleasurable, in the way that a return ride often is.  It doesn't matter that I have accomplished little at the Consulate. It matters that when I alight here, at the farmette, I am so damn happy to be home. The light is mellow, the colors are soft. How good is that!

farmette life, again

It is hard for me to understand how I've gotten to be so intensely busy in these first beautiful days of my "time off." My to-do lists  -- work-wise and farmette-wise -- are getting to be so long, that I no longer think that a day can accommodate everything. So I spend night hours thinking, imagining, planning. And when the first morning light filters in and Isis moves from bed to table to bed again, Ed asks -- you want to go out and plant some more tomatoes?

And I say -- no, no, we can't, it's still dark! 

It's not really dark dark, but I'm glad I can at least argue darkness because I am so tired, too tired. One more hour, just one more hour of sleep.

But by 7, Ed is out at the tomato patch, planting.






I join him. We work in quiet companionship, sharing a small shovel, sharing, too, thoughts about the state of the little tomato plants.

We plant them too closely, of that I'm sure. If all goes well, we'll have a jungle of growth here in early fall. I'll leave the harvest to Ed. Wait, harvest? That comes at the last minute of summer! I can't think that far ahead.

Late in the morning we pause for breakfast. On the porch. This is the slow moment. The one that you don't want to let go of.






And then I am out again, this time with the strawberries. I dig more holes than I need (they come in bundles of 10 or 25). And so Ed picks up more bundles of berries. And I need even more holes.

It continues like this all day long. When my back feels stiff, I go inside and do a little computer work. And then I'm out again.






There's progress in all of the flower beds. You may not see it, but I do.






And there's seasonal progress too, here at the farmette. For example, today, the first blooms apear on the old orchard trees. The ancient sour cherry paves the way.






It's evening now. Supper time. Something easy. Summerlike. Chicken brats again? Yes.






And now my eyes are closing and mistakes wil start creeping into the blog post again. Besides, I need to be up early. Not to plant tomatoes, but to catch the 5 am bus to Chicago.

the lay of the land

[UPDATE no.2: Thank you, Lili, another faithful observer of the farmette life, for reminding me of the silo. Yes, there's that structure as well. Right next to the garage. And as long as I'm updating, make that *60* more everbearing strawberries to plant. In neat little rows, a dozen each, alternating with flowers.]


[UPDATE: Thank you,  Golden West -- this morning's commenter -- for being more alert than I was when I wrote this post! For the sake of thoroughness, I neglected to mention yet another structure on the farmette -- the writer's shed: a pretty little building that was once to be my writing retreat. Before I decided to move here permanently. The writer's shed isn't completely finished, but it can be and perhaps will be some day. Ed says that if they scrap the farm fields and put in a development next to us, we'll put the writer's shed on wheels and set it down somewhere else and start everything again in a new place! All the farmette structures, by the way, form a vast circle: farmhouse at the south, garage at the west, sheep shed and barn at the north and writer's shed at the east. In the center is the vast courtyard that is a place of great magic for me.  You see it in many photos. I can't stop being enchanted by it.
Another correction -- 25 more strawberries to plant!]

A commenter to the previous post asked about the raspberry bushes at the farmette. Well now, it struck me that any number of readers probably do not have such a fine recollection as to what's what. So that when I write about extending a flower bed from the farmhouse to the sheep shed, you may be yawning and wondering -- is this even a big deal?

So let me explain.

The farmette has several structures to it: the farmhouse, of course. In addition, a freestanding garage, but neither of us keeps a car there. It's basically Ed's guy tool and scrap shed. With bikes and motorcycles thrown in.

Then there is the sheep shed. That's Ed's hangout. Machines, papers. cobwebs -- the kind of place where he can retreat and no one will tell him to straighten up and get serious.

And there is a barn. Teetering, yes, that. A lot of loose boards. There's a tractor within it. I know that. But really, I stay away from the place. Over the years, birds have set up nests and as a result, the place is full of bird poop.

Okay, but who cares about the structures! The month of May is about the outdoors. So what can I say about the outdoors?

Visualize this: nearly every project and land improvement plan has focused on the courtyard of the farmette. If you were to drive by our place, you'd never know, for example, that we have just created the biggest flower beds this side of the Mississippi. It's private. Hidden from view. I don't intend it to be that way -- it's just the lay of the land.

In terms of flower beds? Well, I have a mega one to the north of the farmhouse, a sizable one to the west and a difficult one to the east. In addition, we have a tomato patch out back and a new and expanding orchard there as well.

And now the new flower bed that extends on and on, from farmhouse to sheep shed.

There is aloso the raspberry patch. Call it a project. One of top ones to come back to (up there, along with rebuilding the front entrance). There are hundreds, nay, thousands of raspberry canes  just to the east of the sheepshed. They used to bare fruit. One of these days we'll tear them all out and start from the beginning. But not this month. Maybe not even this year. There are too many other projects. And far too few hours in the day to accomplish them all.

But I can try!

And so again, the day is handed over to the world of the outdoors.  We eat breakfast on the porch...






...I take stock (we are nearly at the peak of the daffodil season)...





....and plunge.

Flowers to move, divide, share with the new emergent flower bed. Bareroot strawberries to put in (I plant 10. 15 to go!).

And finally, the tomatoes that we started form seed: let them thrive and fly in the real world out there!





(We planted about two dozen. That's less than a third of what has to go in.)


 At the end of the day we are yet again exhausted.  It's a good thing that my daughter is over for dinner or else I'd keep on going until I could go no more.


Late, very late in the evening, my girl and I walk the land. The sun is nearly set.





We talk about how odd it is that neither girl has the gene of working outdoors. My girls love the flowers, but not the work that goes into raising them. Kids share a little of who you are. But only a little. (Which, really, is a good thing.)

Late in the evening, I play old records and she and I sing loudly to them...


 


...and Ed dozes sweetly, gently, as if nothing in the world could wake or disturb him.

working the soil

It was supposed to rain today, a relentless kind of rain and so when Ed nudges me at dawn and says -- look at the color in the sky -- I go out to take a quick photo because I'm thinking there won't be another opportunity to shoot the outdoors.





Then of course, I cannot fall back asleep. Too many things to do outside.

The air is humid and I know there surely will be more rain. The skies look uncertain. Droplets of water linger on every growing thing.








our resident groundhog


But it's not raining now. And so I'm back with my flowers -- digging, weeding, looking for signs of winter damage, fitting in newcomers.













Ed and Isis look on


Breakfast is very very late.






The day never slows down, though I do get a break from outdoor work in the afternoon. More showers. Ed and I do a Woodman's run. And then it's back to our grand project -- the extended farmhouse to sheep shed flowerbed. It is a huge job. Ripping out the grass cover alone can break the spirit of even the most stubbornly ambitious gardener (and her assistant).






We persevere. And by the end of the day, the stuff that needs to be ripped out is ripped out and the woodchip cover is nearly in place.






We stumble to the farmhouse. Ed instantly falls asleep on the couch and I plod at a ridiculously slow pace to put dinner on our little table. Nothing complicated. Leftover soup, herring on toast, salad. Though, do you notice the little orange glass to the left? An Aperol Spritz! A reward for a day of hard, very hard work outside.

wet

An unusually cold, wet day. Not uninteresting. Just drippy wet.





Isis came in at an ungodly hour (is it ever otherwise?), left, came in again, undecided. My sleep tracked that pattern.

In the end, we were all up earlier than usual. Isis lead the way, but we all had full schedules. And so it was funny that Ed chose this more hurried time to search out cherry trees for our nascent orchard. We lost a couple of trees this winter. They were young -- sticks, nothing more -- and they succumbed to the drought, to the deer, to everything under the sun. We wanted to try again.

All this to say that breakfast was not a relaxed introduction to the day. It was a time to study again root crops and pollination schedules and to make some decisions about the future of the orchard.





That done, the day could move forward.

The earliest hours were, for me, still lost in the haze of May planting, or at least planning for planting. For instance, on my way to campus, I made a quick detour to the Flower Factory because I had forgotten to pick up a Happy Returns lily. My entire game plan for the border by the farmhouse walkway revolves around that lily.

There is, of course, much that should also be added to the emergent flower strip that Ed and I are creating -- the one that links the farmhouse with the sheep shed -- but we're proceeding slowly there.  Seeds are a nice frugal filler for new large beds. I used a lot of seeds these last days: 4 packs of nasturtium, three packs of cosmos, etc.

At the nearly empty grounds of the Flower Factory, I walked with my umbrella from one hoop house to the next, remembering when the place opened some twenty years ago. I was so happy to see that perennials were finally catching on here, in the States.






Today, I had that same feeling of appreciative delight. So much color, even on this bleakest of spring days.


Bleak -- yes. But not a deterrent for the hardy few. There will always be those who'll be out on the waters of our lakes so long as there isn't an ice cover.






Supper. If ever there was a night to make soup -- this was it. I should have kept to our favorites, but instead I was tempted to replicate a chickpea concoction from the newspaper. It was a boring soup. The salad added the color. The soup -- the protein I suppose.





Not everything about a wet day is perfect. For example, Isis left wet prints on the floor every time he went out then in again. And the flowers -- there will always be those that lay down flat under the heaviness of a steady rainfall. But, the paw prints dry, the flowers perk up again. May is kind in that way: it almost always apologizes for its mistakes.

ambition

Ambitious people are a little headstrong. They fight the naysayers. They take calculated risks. They imagine results that aren't really likely. And then they work to make them happen anyway. They never wait for opportunity. They don't believe in opportunity. They believe in taking charge.

Surely it's not a good thing, therefore, to be overly ambitious. You should take note of your limitations! Scale down! Work hard and adjust accordingly!

Good points, just not ones I could ever live by. I've always veered toward being ridiculously ambitious. Though perhaps not in the way you would define ambition. Mine is a little jumpy. One day it may be doing a class of all classes, the next -- to eat the most perfect breakfast on the porch.

Today, it isn't about the classes or the breakfast. For one thing, it's cooled down a bit. So we eat indoors. The sunroom.





The ambition focuses on the outdoors. Sometime in the middle of the day Ed asks -- do you suppose we should extend the flower bed all the way (from the farmhouse) to the sheep shed?

Say what? That would mean ripping out mountains of quack grass and creating insane amounts of space for multiples of  flowers, strawberries, who knows what else.

Yes!





So we begin the job. Neither of us really has the time for it right now and yet, once started, my insane ambitions click in and I want to do it all, today, now, perfectly.

We work our tails off. I don't know how else to put it. We rip, dig, clear. It turns out to be a hellacious  project, yet I never once reconsider.





The bed is (mostly) cleared. We need to dump chips on it. Then plant it.

Ed grunts -- who'll take care of this if you die? (We are prone to such curious conversations.)
Don't worry! Perennial beds last forever. (I say this, but I don't mean it. So I guess I have to keep on living. There's no other way.)


In the early evening we head out to Jung's garden center in search of replacement (dwarf) fruit trees for our young orchard (the starting of it was last year's ambitious project). We're too late. Dwarf cherries, pears -- all gone. Sold out.

We settled for bareroot strawberries. Last year's strawberry crop was a total failure. All devoured by... well, I don't really know by which species of animal. For some reason, we think that merely by planting again we'll be lucky this time around. As if the wild animals are satiated. Or tantalized by other garden crops.






It's been an exhilarating set of days. I'm glad that it'll be cold and wet tomorrow. I have a boatload of work to do. I can't afford another day of ridiculous ambition.

May 1st

All photos were taken before noon. After, you could say that the dirt accumulation around my hands, arms, made me an unlikely candidate for manipulating a camera.

I come back to this question: why am I addicted to working outside? Because I really am that. And I knew it when I moved to the farmette and I sighed deeply and moved here anyway and now, when the weather is as it is (today: perfect), I will use every spare minute to dig, transplant, chop... oh, the list is so long! I ache just thinking back to it all.

Perennial planting has been in my blood for decades even as I can't say I'm very much of an expert at it. I move by impulse and that's not always a wise way to proceed. For instance, I pulled at least three plants out today and then hurriedly replanted them. They were not dead. (It's not always easy to tell on May 1.)

Ed worked with me for a while...


 


...but he has his indoor work projects and they did not end the same day I stopped teaching for the year. So much of the day I worked alone.

A late breakfast on the porch...










...a quick glance at the farmers to the east of us, working tirelessly, with bent backs, shielded in multiple ways from the sun.





And finally, a glance back at the farmhouse. Do you remember how brown it all was just a week ago? Not so now.





I know these warm days will moderate soon. There's rain in the forecast. That's fine. The soil remains dry here. We haven't quite left the drought of last year behind us. But these past few days, my hands are roughened and dirtied by the soil and scratches have appeared on my arms, legs, even stomach (an errant branch did that). I've caught two ticks and I've watched endless worms retreat as I poke at their breeding ground. It's been grand. Really, over the top wonderful.