rebellion

A commenter asks -- is this spell of nonstop work typical?
No, not at all. I have an unusual semester of teaching a subject matter that overlaps only a little with work I've done before and so the amount of reading that I have to do (to say nothing of lecture writing) is voluminous.

But, I'm fast approaching a turning point (in ten weeks!) and I do realize that it cannot be fun to read about endless work and so I'm poking my nose out a little more and feeling a whole lot better for it.

For example, on Tuesday, I slammed the book shut and went out to water the newly planted irises. And that lead to feeling sorry for the neighboring plants which seemed pretty dry and before the morning was over I had spent a hefty forty-five minutes with hose in hand, oblivious to the work world, oblivious to pretty much anything beyond my garden.
















Such a resilient place it is! Though if you look closely, the greens aren't so green anymore. A muted golden tone is starting to set in.






After classes, I again steered rosie past the lesser lake. This is the transition: the calming moment at the end of a long day.






And by the time Ed brought some take out Indian food for supper, I was ready to let go of it all for the day.

Except that you can't really fully let go. Clarifications, notes on top of my notes -- I came back to it all again at midnight and then, too, in the middle of the night, so that by morning, I was again thinking how restless this season has been for me.

But, on the upside (and there is always an upside!), the morning was beautiful, we ate breakfast on the porch, and I had a chance to take a photo of it all. Note the roof: slowly, it's coming down. Slowly but surely -- words to live by.

sitting

Play tennis? -- he asks at the usual hour.
I know he is tired, but he sees that I've been glued to the kitchen chair too long. But I'm not at a point where I can stop work.  
Maybe not today...Or should we?
You haven't moved your butt all day... He says this wanting to get me going.  But it's hopeless.
I'll make it up another time -- I say it without conviction.

So that's the low point -- when I cannot find time even for tennis.

Dinner: how do I treat dinner on these days when I can't seem to find the time to treat anything well?

Well now, I walk to the new orchard and vegetable patch, passing the increasingly solitary blooms...






The days are so much shorter! Long shadows on the fields to the north of us appear early. Too early.






I see that the animals have attacked our young fruit trees again. We haven't built the protective cages. We're paying the price for neglect.

Corn. There is still corn. (The only growing thing at the farmette, aside from trees, that's taller than Ed!)






And I do what I always do when I don't have time to think about food: I roast the vegetable du jour (today -- cauliflower), make a huge salad (one with plenty of tomatoes and cucumbers because we still have a daily supply from the garden)






...throw in those last few ears of corn, boil some eggs - not too long, just so,  and finally -- share a fresh panfried trout and some scraps of smoked salmon with Isis. It's come to that: I cook fish for the cat and then we steel some of it for our own supper.







And so the days hobble on and bleary eyed and somewhat drunk with work I tally forth. Round the clock.






Dinner then, breakfast now. On the porch. Cool (in the fifties), but with such good views toward a better world.


 



And the sun continues to taunt me -- you could be gardening! you need to help the new orchard! to fix the raspberry patch! Nagging thoughts, not much more than that.

Fall

If you say the word "fall" for me, all I can think of is "fall behind." If you ask me -- what did you do today? I can truthfully answer -- fall behind. No matter how hard I try, inevitably, I fall behind.

I've stopped going to yoga.

We haven't gone to Paul's cafe for weeks.

Long bike rides? Kayak outings? Hikes? So yesterday.

And even as I do none of those things, I fall behind.

But at the least, at the very least, I can look out at the world just outside my kitchen windows (when not on the porch, I work at the kitchen table) and be just tickled at what's taking place before me.

For example, as Ed rips the roof off the porch...






...there are strips of sunlight finally coming through -- to the porch and indirectly, to the kitchen.






Still, by mid-afternoon, I can't stand it any longer. I'm out. First, to pick some fruit from the old orchard.











Then, not satisfied with the tininess of the break, I go further, for a walk up the country road.






To the Nature Conservancy path...











...and back again.











An hour outside and I am restored.

Evening comes, the sun continues to paint the farmette in warm and glowing tones.






But Ed is exhausted. And I'm tired too, in a very different sort of way.  We do try to put in a good half hour on the tennis court and if you saw our game today, you'd think this was our first year at it. Terrible. (In a fun sort of way.)

And there you have it -- a fall, no, sorry, a fall behind Sunday.



And in the morning, after a quick breakfast in the sun room...





... it continues. I'll always remember the Fall of 2013 as one that mightily passed me by. No matter. No Fall will over look like this again. That's a promise.

if we knew then what we know now...

I fell asleep thinking of those words. And then trying to recall where they were from. Yes -- I remember: they're from a movie that my younger girl and I watched umpteen times when she was still in her years of exquisite dancing. The Turning Point. About the moment when you decide whether to continue or to stop dancing. Because to be great, you can't do it on the side. You have to put your soul and energy into the enterprise.

By the time she reached high school, my girl had her own turning point -- dance, or academics. She chose the latter.

It wasn't traumatic or difficult (I don't think). She was a beautiful dancer, but the world of dance is like the world of football -- it places great physical demands on you without necessarily a promise of success. Opting for schoolwork at the very least kept many more doors open.

I think when you pass a certain age (say sixty), you have to stop keeping all those doors open for yourself. You need to slam them shut, even if it limits your options. In other words, you need to decide how best to spend your most treasured resource  -- time.

And as I work through my law materials, my lectures, as I look outside at my lingering garden (spotty, but still occasionally colorful)...






...I think about how this year, I'm doing just that.


In the meantime, Ed is on the roof. (To a commenter: it doesn't look that way, but yes, the roof does slant. And, for the curious, he's not just putting in a panel of glass. He is cutting some twenty panels (so that they meet code) and installing them between the beams. Incredibly tough, because once down, he can't walk on them. Right now, he's pulling up the old roof -- a challenge in its own right given that he can't even get to the nails holding it down. So pry from the inside, pull from the upside. Over and over again.)






And because I am somewhat terrified that with his prying moves he'll come crashing down, I prefer to focus not on him, but on the flowers that are just refusing to call it quits.






If you ask me why I am such a huge fan of daylilies, surely I'll point to these guys, blooming away on a cool, late September day.






Isis is not happy with the noises, the movements, the bits of roof flying to the ground. He meows, he paces and finally he gets Ed to come down and pay attention to him.





Don't feel too bad for the cat though. He has been well cared for. Indeed, he has been nibbling on leftover trout meat daily. Bits of fish and skin as a special treat, morning and afternoon. (And then we speculate as to why he's been refusing his canned kitty food back at the sheep shed.)


In the evening Ed and I play tennis again. A heavenly game of gleeful jousting and volleying in the pine scented courts.

To get to the park, we always pass Farmer Lee's old fields. May I forever remember these years where, leaving the farmette, I could glance over Ed's shoulder (from the motorbike) and see her flowers.






Sunday morning: I glance at the thermometer: fifty out there, on the porch. Forget it. We'll eat inside.

But it is a beautiful day. And I think that if anyone has that sense of being suddenly older, wiser, gentler, more confident, more happy -- it would be my older girl today. She was married a year ago, on an equally splendid (if somewhat blustery) day. Did they know then how blissfully content they would be in the year ahead?

A flashback and a look to the future: one couple just married (to the right), the other -- now engaged (to the left).



September 22, 2012


Breakfast. In case you are wondering why we want to replace the roof on the porch -- look how much roof we have out the kitchen windows. Light -- soon there will be light. Yeah!

flowers and buckets and tennis balls

Could I interest you in a photo of one of the flower pots by the walkway?





Because it's getting to be awfully colorless out in the garden otherwise. Especially when, this morning, Ed threw down a bit of roof and chopped off all the remaining blooms of the ever faithful phlox.

Sorry! -- he tells me, though really, he owes no apology. He's doing the impossible. There will be flower casualties.  It can't be avoided.

I pass him the next tool and he continues to tear down the roof.






Friday was my usual combination work (at home) and shop (in three separate grocery stores, because that's how complicated it is to bring good foods at optimal prices to the table). And work some more.


Could I also interest you in a photo of the prairies along one of the roads into town?






Back at the farmette, it's getting very fall-like. The grape vine, growing up and around the sheep shed, has its bunches ready for harvest. We'll be having grape jam along with the apple and peach varieties already put aside for the winter.






Late in the evening I am finally able to shake off the tensions of the week: we ride out to our secluded tennis courts -- the ones with pines on three sides, sending billows of scented air every time you take a deep breath. In the dozens and dozens of times we've played on these cracked courts with the somewhat sagging nets, only twice did we have company on the companion court. For us, playing in seclusion is almost the best part. We get lost in that small world of pines and flying balls and the world seems like such a good and noble place.

Your game is so good now! -- he tells me. That's an exaggeration, but still, I'm glad. I hated that he had to play down to my level for all these years.


And the next morning it really is cool again, but I just cannot give up that morning breakfast on the porch and so I take it all out  -- the flowers, the fruits, the favorite cereals...





...and we linger, despite the fact that it's in the fifties, like the people who refuse to see that the days have moved on. What flowers remain are carefully picked out of a bed that has precious few left.

Can I interest you in a photo of the morning vase -- with mint and lavender and nasturtium?

finality

Sometimes you expect finality and sometimes you expect things to continue and oftentimes what happens is exactly the opposite of what you would have predicted.

I had made two predictions yesterday -- one about eating outside, the other about plans for the future and it turns out I was wrong about eating outside and the jury's still out about whether I am right or wrong about the future. I'm betting I'm right and if I am right you will soon learn the full context of this rather vague discussion. I need certainty before I post things on Ocean. (Except for predictions about eating outside, where certainty is not required.)

Yesterday was such a bizarre day that I'm still trying to put a correct spin on it.

First -- the weather. Shorts and tank top were not light enough. The temps peaked at 88 but it felt like Miami Florida in mid August.

I worked on the porch, trying to understand how it could be that the flowers are spent and yet the weather is screaming at them that it's not time to retire! Too early! Too soon!





Fine, except when you're done, you're done -- they retort and continue to drop their petals and go into hibernation.

In the afternoon, I take a break and plant my seven irises -- four in one bed, two in another, one on the side. Really? -- they seemed to be asking. You expect us to settle in and establish a home base here before winter? If you say so... I add good composting soil to make the transition that much pleasanter. Now it's up to them.

Finally, in the evening, I am reeling from a tumultuous day of work and decisions and irises and the hot muggy air and as I continue to work on my laptop I get the email warning of storms coming through. And it is at this point that Ed sets up the ladder to begin one of his most challenging construction projects ever -- to  replace the porch roof with strips of glass.





It will be a long and arduous job -- weeks and weeks of work up there -- but I have to throw out this question: are you *sure* you want to begin just as the storms are about to descend on us?
He shrugs: tell me when they're here -- and continues with his sky-high assessment of the work ahead.

The irony is that the skies turn an eerie dark navy and the trees shudder a little and then -- nothing happens. A flash elsewhere, a small gust and quiet.

You'd think that the air cleared and that we have returned the corner -- to the same old crisp fall weather that we count on now, but it's never quite like that, is it? More often, transitions happen over an expanse of time and this one is moving slowly, artfully, so that in the morning, I step out, sample the air and say to Ed -- we'll be eating breakfast on the porch again.

And we do.

the night

It started as a regular old Wednesday. I do a quick walk through the gardens, noting that the cosmos troopers are really carrying the show in many places, including along the path to the sheep shed.






By the farmhouse, the reblooming daylilies are showing signs of life, and the phlox, and... oh, let me not list them! There are that many.






I teach today and again I stay in my office late, working on exam questions. And so it's evening by the time I swing rosie by the secondary lake...






...pulling into our path in the golden evening light. The garden looks at its best now, just as the sun is setting.






I note that it's warm outside. Warmer than the morning, warmer than just an hour ago. Nonetheless, the plan is  to cook chili tonight and I do that. So many small tomatoes to clean, cut, stir in!

And again I'm tired early. We both are. But wait -- could it be daytime again? The night is so bright!

Sometime after midnight, I wake up and glance out at the dazzling sky. In the distance I see faint signs of a thunderstorm. But above us, the skies are almost clear.

I go outside. Warm! How can it be this warm?!






That moon! it surely cannot be anything less than full!

A September 19th harvest moon -- beautiful and proud.






The cat goes in, the cat goes out. The night passes. The morning is still as warm, no -- warmer! We eat breakfast out on the porch -- of course we do! The last time perhaps...






Yes, the last time.






I sit down and rewrite for the millionth time a very important letter. Just after the noon hour I send it, then I settle down to work.