Friday: excitement

We woke up to rain. The farmette is on a slight hill and so flooding here is unlikely, but the ground is so saturated that the courtyard had a half inch of water for us to slosh through on our way to let the chickens out.

Well, okay. But it's morning rain.






After a rather hurried breakfast...





...the skies turned partly blue. Oh, how lovely it is to see that sky again after a week of oppressive humidity alternating with high winds and relentless rain!

The organic cedar oil, even though it was dispersed just before the rain started, still has had a noticeable effect on the mosquito population. For the first time in days I did not have to slap myself silly and shake my head to ward off that hateful buzz every time I stepped into a grassy or shady area.

The tent people arrived: seven muscled men and a heavy canvas structure. Up it went. Every one of them proclaimed that the raspberry island underneath was a delightful little touch. I did not explain that I had been trying desperately to get rid of it and finally, after viewing the nice plump berries ripening on last year's canes, I gave up and let them remain (though thinned out extensively, that's for sure).

Here's how it all looks:






And here's a peak from underneath the tent toward the barn:





Yes, that was one of my projects: climb up a high ladder and paint them a sign, dedicating their love right there on the barn.

And it all worked like clockwork. (Well, almost: the cheepers were underfoot, so several times I had to herd them to the pen. The hens can easily fly out, but at least it keeps Oreo under control. For the wedding, they'll be in the coop.)





And so the chairs came.





The tables came.





The music came (to practice).






And the garden, while it didn't produce nearly the blooms that it should have by now, it's okay anyway. Really okay!





And finally, the wedding party came and tweaked the set up somewhat and made it, well, perfect.

The rehearsal is about to begin.


Later:

Oreo calmed down.





The rehearsal was seamless.

The dinner after it, hosted by my soon to be in-laws was splendid.

The weather all evening long was perfect.






The reception for all wedding guests at Cooper's Tavern was beautifully touching, as friends got up to speak about the virtues of these two young adults...



her college roommates





his high school friends





the young couple listening





my older girl with husband and her college friends


The night, this last night of spring was beautiful. Tomorrow: the wedding.

Thursday: teamwork

We gather the troops in the evening at the farmhouse: the soon-to-be-marrieds...





...my older daughter and her husband...





...the inlaws, out of town friends of one of my girl's but really of both, because close friends become like family, my girls' dad -- all here, eating pizza and talking about what? Oh, the weather, for one thing!

They traveled from all corners of the country to be here for my soon  to be married girl. The Minneapolis contingency drove, which is good because the airport there closed due to continuous and heavy rains. (I know because another friend is stuck there, waiting for a way to come to Madison.) When will I remember that weather these days is never just "normal?"

It's been a crazy day -- not pf physical work this time but of coordination. You know how it is: nothing goes according to plan. The potty guy was to come in the morning, but now he's worried that he can't get his truck through to the site. Soggy ground, heavy truck.

He is correct in his worries: he cannot. We need a different strategy. Many consulting calls later, we have a new place, a tad too close to Ed's beloved pear tree. Branches should be cut. Ed balks, volunteering to hold them high as the truck passes. Ed goes away, I snip off a branch or two. I mean, we don't even eat half the pears from that tree.

The tree guy for the dangling willow branch does not show. I throw it to the group -- do we cordon off the area? Do we relocate the ceremony?

The cedar oil sprayers didn't show up yesterday and again didn't show up today. No explanation. No one picks up the phone.[Update: he made it! He's here!]

The tent guy, too, doesn't show up but at least he promises an early morning arrival tomorrow. I tell him -- it didn't rain today. It will rain tomorrow. You like working in the rain?

The French bakers don't make it to the local farmers market. She calls me and tells me they have my eclairs (tonight's dessert), but if I want them, I'm going to have to travel to get them. Ed, help!!

But we don't really review all those details tonight. We think ahead. The focus is on how to coordinate all that remains for tomorrow and the next day. I can hear Ed's thoughts -- they are loud and have been echoing in the air for months now -- all that work for one day!

But it's not one day. It's a life together and I know so many are reminding you that marriages so often don't last, but neither does life and so should we not live it for the wonderful days when it is given to us?

The weather broods. At sunrise, there is a very thin strip of orange sky, but that ribbon gets quickly pushed aside and the gray skies remain with us for the day.






Yes, it rained a bit in the morning, but that's like telling someone who has sat in the basement through two tornadoes that there is a bit of a breeze outside. Who would even notice?



 


Breakfast had been leisurely. A last breath before the frenzy of coordination, calling, texting, with last minute mowing, last minute chip distribution, last minute branch removal.





And now it is evening and I tell myself that after everyone leaves I will catch up with sleep. I am significantly under-sleeping and that cannot be.

Will it all come together? Of course it will. And tomorrow -- will it fly as quickly and will my team here get everything checked off their lists as I wait for the arrival of tent, tables and who knows what else?

I'll let you know.

Wednesday: picking up debris

Storms, tornadoes, high winds, rain -- they were to come this way again at night, but they didn't. I kept checking my phone for weather alerts -- nothing. Are we done with violent weather?

We are not.

I get up at five for the chickens. They're quiet. Why? Usually Oreo crows for a good half hour before I get to them. I look out the kitchen window: dark still, even though it's the sunrise hour.





I walk to the coop tentatively. Look to the left, to the right... no, no fallen trees. Everything seems... normal.

And very still. Tense. Why?

I let the chickens out. Or, I open the coop door and unlike any other time since the day they came to live with us, they do not rush out. They stay inside as if transfixed.

Eventually one comes out, then the next and now they're out, even if they're tredding ever so cautiously... As if they knew that some meteorological event was again heading our way.

I go back to the farmhouse and within the hour the rain comes down. Hard. And the winds pick up. And soon my phone jumps and dances and warns us that there is yet again a tornado in the area.

Honestly, I would not have been surprised to see all the trees collapse on top of the sheep shed, or each other, or both -- the winds were that strong. But the tornado itself did not touch down here (it did to the east of us) and so our damage was less than yesterday's. Still, it was another day of picking up limbs and cutting back sagging branches.

We did have a fairly normal breakfast...





And when it rained, I caught up with cleaning the sheep shed and tending to such essentials as giving Ed a haircut.

But mostly, we worked outside again.

I wish I could give you more photos, but the work is such that a camera is an encumbrance and so I mostly park it inside. Too, the garden has slowed down a lot in its progression toward summer. The blooms are on the cusp, but they are not there yet. They need sunshine! The rain has given them a good vigorous push, but the flowering is definitely delayed this year. I did take one photo -- it's of the slowly emerging Wdding Phlox Miss Lingard -- the white spikes to the front.





They anchor the garden right now and that's a good thing.

I also have a photo of the venerable willow that's giving us so much trouble right now. You cannot really tell how massive the torn limb is -- it's to the right of the main trunk -- but I wanted to post this as a testament on how efficient Ed and I can be in cleaning storm debris. That's a darn clean looking wedding site, isn't it?





Tomorrow, the first of the Minneapolis crowd arrives. As do the toilets, the tent, the cedar oil sprayers, the tree people (I'm hoping) and, of course, the soon to be married couple. Friday -- more arrivals. Lots of people. Tables. Rehearsals. Chairs, sound systems. All that, followed by dinners and parties, hosted by the groom's family. Saturday -- well now, that's the obvious one: the wedding and dinner here, followed by more eating and dancing downtown. Sunday -- brunch for the out of towners (which in this case is nearly everyone). And there you have it: four days of festivites.

I'll be here, on Ocean, but I have to think with fewer words, though not fewer photos! And maybe that's a good thing?

Tuesday: tornado!

I had gone to bed earlier than Ed. Exhausted, I fell asleep well before midnight. Not for long. My phone started buzzing and vibrating and then a message appeared: tornado warning!

Ed often sits out these warnings. Tornadoes are so rare here: it's been decades since any one did much damage around the Madison area. What are the chances? But, I coaxed him to pay attention to the warning, if only to keep me company as we huddled with my computer and phone in the basement while the winds roared outside.

Oddly, the internet never failed and the lights stayed on. But reports of damage began pouring in. Madison. Verona (which is just south of us). These were the know sites of a touchdown.

We went to sleep thinking that we were the lucky ones. In so many ways! When my daughter had first asked about doing the wedding here, my first thought was -- where will I hide 150 people if a tornado rips through? I mentally distributed guests throughout the lower portions of the farmhouse, remembered that we hadn't had a storm with severe damage in decades and pushed that thought out of my mind. This tornado came just days before the wedding but that surely is better than coming on the day of the big event itself!


At five, tired, but wanting to get my chores ticked off, I went to open the coop. At first, I didn't see it. Everything looked tensely still and rather gray.

But when I approached the sheep shed it became clear that we hadn't gotten get away unscathed. A large part of a monstrously large tree had crashed onto the sheep shed. I go inside: all seems in place (or in Ed's idea of place). But outside -- the roof is damaged and my new little flower bed is buried somewhere between the heavy limbs of a box elder.






There is more: the willow in back -- the designated site for the Saturday ceremony -- had split off one of its tallest fattest limbs, some 50 feet up above from where we were.  And of course, the ground was strewn with tree limbs -- heavy, light, very heavy, all shapes and sizes.



(for perspective: the white corner board of the sheep shed is 6'5'' tall -- so that Ed can stand up inside)


I would find more damage later on: the big maples lost many branches -- we have a cemetery of them in the front yard! And the second willow too had scattered limbs to the ground. (How a large limb found its way halfway down the property is beyond me, especially since it would have had to circumvent the writer's shed.)

After an hour or so of "I can do this by myself" bravado, Ed agrees to call our local pal the arborist with the tree service company. Needless to say, we are caller number 10692. Or some such high number. Because the tree guy lives nearby, he stops by to help us assess the severity of the damage. We all agree that in the immediate time period,  Ed and I can saw off most of the fallen branches. The long term project of dealing with the damage to the trees, we'll put on hold until after things calm down in Madison.

Not that I wasn't filled with a bit of regret as our friend pulled out of our driveway! Sawing off trunks nearly a foot in diameter suspended somewhere above us where the electric pole saw wont reach seems daunting.

We work, we pause to catch our breath, we work we pause to catch our breath.





This continues all day long.

Add to it the necessary main mowing that is on the timetable for today and we really do have our hands full.

But there are many upsides. For instance, there was absolutely no damage to the farmhouse. She stands proudly now. Resilient.






And though we didn't take breakfast outside and we didn't rush to it (it was past noon before I even hinted at pausing work), still, it was lovely to finally sit down to a bowl of oatmeal.






And one more sweet moment -- Farmer Lee's sister who works the little field in the back of the farmhouse brought us some young potatoes. She'd been harvesting them all day.










So yes, we consider ourselves to be quite lucky.

May that luck hold as a second storm system passes through tonight.

Monday: hose and pantyhose

I watered everything today. Everything. We have multiple hoses and I used them all. For many hours. And typically this is a pleasant activity for me, but we have bugs now and I learned something about myself: I've been as stupid about my established gardens as Ed had once been (continues to be?) about raspberry patches: he doesn't like to prune raspberries, I don't like to thin flowers.

The consequence of our stupidity is that we attract more bugs than we need to. I understood that early on about raspberries -- that's why we thinned them considerably and replanted the bed, to lessen the feeling of a jungle out there. But there surely is a jungle in some of my beds, especially the ones I planted early on -- a handful of years ago. I wanted abundance and I got it, but I should have thinned and divided every year after the first and that seems to be something I had been reluctant to do (why settle for two stalks of day lilies or Japanese anemonies, when you can have four or five?).

I'll tackle dividing many of the flowers next year. But today, I took a deep breath and thinned emergent new growth everywhere. And I clipped thousands of spent daffodils and tulips.

Basically I worked in the epicenter of mosquito heaven, dressed for today's hot weather in shorts and a tank top. I hadn't thought, up to now, that this year's work was a labor of love, since basically I enjoy working the soil. But today was truly that labor: a brutal ten hours of clipping, pulling, watering and slapping off bugs left and right, because I want this place to be cleaned up and ready!

At the end of the day I had an incredible feeling of accomplishment. The garden (the old beds) already feels better -- more airy, dense but not overwhelming. And I finished it all, so that I can actually retire for a while from garden work. And that's a good thing, because I need to slow down the pace of work out there.


We had another hose at the farmette -- besides the one for watering, there was one from the Honey Wagon (a sweet name for the septic repair outfit). And yes, they found the problem in the septic system: one leaky pipe that will eventually have to be replaced. At least the tank was cleaned out and so we're good for a while as Ed contemplates how to make this rather major repair in the future.

And why is there pantyhose in the subject again? Well, after running the whipper last night (to clear grass at the edges of walkways and around trees) and slapping off bugs today and working in a dense growth of scratchy branches, my legs look so bruised that I'm wondering if pantyhose may be their only salvation come Saturday.

Or maybe it will all heal and this week's storms will blow over and the various oils and vapors will keep the bugs away. Maybe. Between the two of us -- Ed strays toward finding the possible problem out there, even as I like to look forward to a better outcome. I'm full of such hope right now.


As for our routine? In place today. Sort of.

Up with dawn -- that doesn't change! Here's looking out from the chick pen:



 


But breakfast is very late. I am so engrossed in my garden work that when I pause to make breakfast, I am shocked to see that it is nearly noon. Still, we eat our usual and it is blissful.






Afterwards, Ed has his usual quiet time with Oreo...






My quiet time is in the garden. Sometimes I find a small corner of a flower bed really makes me grin. (Here's one from today. Nothing but yellows and blues...)






At other times, I'm very focused on the entirety. Note how the oldest flower bed - the one just by the farmhouse porch -- has almost no blooms yet. That one was planted for a midsummer and late summer, on the assumption that in June I'd be away. By contrast, the large newer bed -- the one you see in part at the bottom of the photo -- is geared more toward this time, the time of early summer.








I have one more comment on the farmette. Remember the fields I mowed out back toward the beginning of spring? Well, in at least some of those fields, I see the emergence of prairie flowers. That's enough to make anyone smile.





You too, I hope.

Sunday

It starts with the weather. Always the weather. A cloudy, moody day. Though not initially. You surely could not find fault with the sunrise.





Breakfast on the porch -- the one "outside" space rarely affected by what's out there. When Ed say -- let me go and do some work... I interrupt and say -- no, not yet, let's linger a little. It's so calm.





And we do linger and we have our moment of calm.

I thought then about how I should space activities this week. The big clean up, the polish, the shine, the last tweak in the garden -- that's Wednesday stuff, before the first visitors arrive Thursday. Wednesday, too, is the mowing extravaganza. I will do it because I want it just so. It will take up a good portion of the day to finish the final cut.

And today? What can I work on from my increasingly shorter list?

There is the preclean. You may laugh: why preclean if you're going to clean on Wednesday? Well now, today I'm getting into the crevices. Vacuuming ceilings. Dusting things that wont have to be dusted again. Doing a massive laundry...

And I'm thinking: now is the time to test the septic system. When I worried that we hadn't tracked down the problem the last time it backed up half a year ago, when I thought we should rip everything up and start with a new system (my solution for everything, it seems!), when I fretted that it will choose to back up on us in the week of the wedding, Ed suggested that we flood the system, all waters running, just days before the wedding. If it shows no signs of backing up, we will certainly sail through the week itself without a glitch.

So I did the laundry and ran the shower and flushed the toilet many times. Great! No sign of a back up in the farmhouse! Big sigh of relief!

What now? Let me attack the sheep shed.

You'll recall, perhaps, that the sheep shed is where Ed housed himself before I agreed to move to the renovated by us farmhouse (now three years ago). In the first six years of my life with him, I rarely came down to the farmette. We spent all our time in the places I lived: first the apartment downtown, then the condo, also downtown. When Ed coaxed me to spend more time at the farmette, I balked. The farmhouse was unfinished, dirty, not at all inviting, not even for an afternoon. The sheep shed -- worse. It houses many of Ed's machines and there is the perpetual smell of grease and oil and who knows what else. And of course, I'm the clean nut, Ed is the opposite.

Several times I volunteered to clean the sheep shed, but it was pointless. He didn't want his machine stuff disturbed. And even if I wiped down the kichenette and the bathroom, it never was good enough for me even as it was horribly discomforting for him.

One solution was to built a separate shed for me to hang out in. Ergo -- the building of the writer's shed. We never finished it (the project will be continued some day, with different use plans) because halfway through, I agreed to move permanently to the farmhouse.

Why this reliving of our history? Because when I went down to the sheep shed today (I rarely go there -- I have no reason to do so; it's his space and I don't care how cluttered and dusty it is), I smiled at the memories of my first attempts to clean the place up. And I smiled, too, because I was getting it ready for the wedding: it's a bathroom option for elderly guests who can't navigate the portable toilet system that has been rented and, too, it's handy for caterers who can access the sink there.

So I cleaned. And in running that shower and that toilet, I backed up the septic system and basically flooded the shed's bathroom with stuff you'd never want to see.


Tomorrow, the septic team will be here trying to again locate the problem. Will they? We don't know. It could be that the entire system will need to be dug up and we'll have to start from scratch. (That's a very complicated project.) The hope is that the correction will be easy and we will continue as before. If not, well then we can probably coast on borrowed time this week. I think.

No, I'm not at the point where you'd catch me singing -- "darling I love you, but give me Park Avenue" -- but I have to say, living in the country is not dull!


Disheartened somewhat by this new wrinkle, I needed a pick me up and nothing hollers happy times more than a trip to my new found perennial growers -- the two older women who who sell their  divided plants. We didn't buy much, but simply being among plants with people who love their flowers and especially their daylilies felt good. Joyous. It placed things in perspective. (And BTW, here's another day lily at the farmette, beginning its bloom. She's radiant and rather jolly, no?)






On our way home, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up ice cream bars for Ed. He had a hankering and we're slated to have some hot days before us so it seemed opportune. We looked at all the boxes of chocolate covered vanilla bars. The ingredients seemed positively frightening, but still, the hankering continued and so we bought a box. In true Ed fashion, he took out a few bars for the car ride home. I sampled one. The taste was exactly as you would remember it from fifty years ago were you alive then! And so we rode home munching nostalgia bars and admiring the beauty of our farmlands fronting the rural roads.

It was a very good moment.


My older girl and her husband came over for dinner and as we sat on the parch, the sun came out again and the moody strain of the day completely fizzled.





By the time I readied the coop for the night, the day had redeemed itself completely and I refused to give even a passing thought to sinks draining and toilets flushing. And that's a good thing.

I'll leave you with a photo of one of my most reliably blooming flowers -- for weeks now it has held steady and strong. Tonight's colors remind me of the Polish flag!





And now let the wedding week begin!

Saturday

The ten day weather forecast on weather.com has changed dramatically in its predictions for next Saturday. I have watched it show sunshine, showers and now -- isolated thunderstorms. You have to wonder why the website even bothers putting anything up for a day that's many weather systems away. Does it ever remain the same for the entire ten day period?

At least this morning was as last night's forecast predicted for us: sunny and warm. Good chicken release weather. (With a spectacular sunrise.)






Good breakfast on the porch weather.






And with a gentle breeze, good outdoor work weather. I methodically work through small tasks (no more big ones -- those are all done for the season), enjoying the summer-like feeling of a garden's abundance.






In fact, I enjoy it so much, that time slips by too quickly and when I ask Ed to go to the downtown Farmer's Market with me, it's already past noon. We're nearing the last few minutes of vendor presence. Just enough time to buy oyster mushrooms, cheese, strawberries and two bunches of the cheapest of cheap flowers -- ones that have staying power: daisies and clover, sold here:






We're back on the porch for a p. b. and j. lunch. It is at once quiet (anyone who uses our country road to get to the lake has gone by already and no one is coming back yet) and noisy (the wind moving in between all our trees is never quiet), in the best of ways. Had I followed the Sorede (south of France) habit of having a glass of rosé for lunch, I would be dozing in the sling back chair by now. But, habits belong to locations and I would no more sip rosé here for lunch than I would eat a croissant for breakfast. Funny how that works.

In the evening I lay down my daffodils stalks. One of the toughest things about mingling daffodils with your perennials is that your perennials are up and running and the daffodils are long gone and yet you're not allowed to cut them back until they turn yellow. I can never hold out that long, but I try! This year they got four weeks of post bloom life. Over the next few days I'll be cutting them back completely. I am SO done with them!

Time to put away the shovel, the clippers, the hose. The buckets of soil, the cartloads of chips. Cheepers, go back to your coop!





They do go back. Eventually.

pantyhose

Like so many women, I dislike wearing pantyhose. I was lucky that my work life did not require it. On the occasion that I'd wear a skirt, I'd search out a pair of tights. There is a difference, for those of you who haven't a clue as to why I should be fussy as to one but not the other.

Still, for a wedding, it seems fitting to look for the sheer stuff. And so two years ago, when my older girl got married, I bought two pairs -- in case one ripped (the cursed things are more fragile even than my chickens' eggs). Well, the first pair didn't rip and so I thought -- great! I'll save the second for my youngest girl's wedding!

...until I found out just this weekend that she's not wearing them and if she isn't wearing them then surely I don't have to! Moreover, when I queried a friend as to how unusual this would be, she informed me that women these days don't wear pantyhose. Sheer stockings, especially at weddings, are sort of passé.

Well now, how does this happen? You continue with your rules and habits as if they were there, scripted for everyone, into infinity (because surely pantyhose are a modern improvement on stockings and garter belts and I remember how much I disliked those! ).

So what else has changed and why isn't someone keeping me informed?! Like texting and Instagram -- both of which became de rigeur sometime when I wasn't looking and suddenly my old fashioned adherence to the blog just seems so quaintly archaic! My mom, she blogs -- my girls probably explain, benevolently looking my way in that special way you reserve for the very old.

That's okay. One has to distinguish oneself from the next generation. I guess for me, it'll be that pair of pantyhose that now has no future except to rest in my drawer as a testament to my antiquity. Let me show you what my great grandma has in her drawers. It's something called panty hose! Isn't that weird? 


In other news -- well, there was sunshine and plenty of it.



at dawn




at breakfast


All day long. Since it's Friday, I took time out to do weekly grocery shopping, realizing that I wont be doing it again until late July, as I'm leaving soon after my daughter's wedding. So I stocked up.

And though I am now getting jittery about all that I still have to do in the days before the wedding, I did take the time to go for a walk with my older girl. Two things worth mentioning from my time with her:

First, there is the matter of cats. That girl cannot say no to the sweet face of a needy cat online and so as of this week, she and her husband took in two foster cats (in addition to their permanent cat Goldie, who has been featured many times on Ocean). The two newcommers are brothers and they cannot find a permanent home easily for the simple reason that they are incredibly shy. I mean, over the top retreating. All day, they hide in the darkest most enclosed space, one on top of the other, refusing to come out until everyone in the house is asleep.




virgil





lucas


Whatever trauma they endured in their first years of life surely has left a mark. Beautiful cats. Hiding.

(I did warn my girl that just because you think you are a temporory "foster" caregiver to an animal, doesn't mean that you're likely to ever hand that animal back to wherever she or he came from. I should know. I think my girl muttered uh-huh, or some other such phrase that you use when you're not really listening.)

The second thing to note is that there is a world out there beyond the farmette, even if I haven't really focused on it much in recent weeks. For instance, as we walked by the lakes, I had to pause and admire the skyline.





I suppose I'm not really a Madisonian anymore, since I live in the country outside the city limits, but I still find this view of our city to be quite special.

Alright. Back to the place that catches most of my attention at the moment: the farmette. Not many photos today. I worked awfully hard at something no one will ever even notice -- clearing the weeds under the old orchard trees. My theory is that the guests would have noticed had I left them there and, too, I'll do anything to make the place less inviting to bugs and mosquitoes. And so I pushed a mower and clipped and pruned and did the dirty work that actually is what the farmette needs most to look her best. Flowers are all well and good and I did plant my day lilies in the evening, with great care, but planting doesn't occupy one tenth the time that clearing, pruning, weeding do.

I feel about the farmette now like I do about clothes just after all the laundry has been washed, folded and put away: it's great to do this massive cleaning. Even though I know darn well that in a short period of time, like the clothes neatly hanging in your closet, the farmette will all get disheveled and overgrown again. But for one fine moment, the weeds will be cleared, just like the laundry that will have been done, with the scent of clean cotton and line dried linen hanging in the air and all will feel right with the world, or at least your small corner of it.


Honey moon tonight. Big, orange, full. Rare. Beautiful.