the real November

So how cold is it, Nina?
Oh, so cold that a one minute foray outdoors, to throw some seeds and bread pieces at the cheepers has me cowering and huddling. Their feathers blow every which way and I have to wonder -- do they maybe hate winter? is it tough for them to get through the next five months?






I have this sense of guilt as I come indoors into the warm farmhouse. And mix up a pancake batter for Ed. And pour sweet honey over my oatmeal.





How is it that we have so much privilege? For a fleeting second I almost want to go out and get a heating unit for their coop, but we've been warned: don't give it to this unless there is a polar vortex, or they wont be able to adapt to the cold. Seems like tough love though, doesn't it?

In contrast to yesterday's productive slog through tough work, today is gently paced. The winds howl, the temps stay in the upper thirties, the cheepers crouch for most of their daylight hours under the old pickup.

But close to evening (these days, evening merges with late afternoon!), I go out. To meet a friend for a cup or glass of something downtown. The skies are pouty, the air is crisp.






And the light is gone when I leave the cafe to find my car again. A black cat moves slowly across my path, then hesitates as I do my cat calling noises.





He comes over and stretches himself at my feet.
Sorry, buddy. I need to get home to my guys. I'm not a night prowler anymore. This is your domain. Your way of life.

I get in the old Escort and drive into the deeply dark night of the country.

digging in

Split the day in half, right down the middle. Catalog the first part under "intense outdoor clean up, the tail end" and the second part under "let's get back to manuscript work, shall we?" -- and you have my entire day laid out for you.

I know I've been claiming that I'm done with farmette work for a number of days now, but really, with so many beds, trees and who knows what else to tend to, the job is never really done. Not until it gets so cold that you cannot conceive of going out with a shovel and pruning sheers again. From what I hear, that kind of a chill will creep down on us tomorrow, so most likely these are the last photos of cheepers watching as I chop, pull and trim and Ed mulches down all spent growth (and puts away things that should have been stored some weeks ago).





Perhaps you have noticed that Oreo is still here. Indeed. Just as I stood ready to dance a crazy rooster dance right back at him, he decides to settle down. Yep -- you got it. The rooster has stopped chasing me. And so he has bought himself time. Surely I'm not going to call the knife to him when he is, at the moment, doing nothing more than tending to his girls.










I do have my eye on the guy, but for several days now, he has held steady.

Oh fine. I should have given a proper introduction to the day. Here we go -- a healthy breakfast. One that prepared us for the physical work outside.






And one more comment on the outdoors: the prize to the stubbornest bloomer goes to this wonderful girl -- she is awash with white flowers right now. I took a photo of one with the bee still doing her work.





The afternoon? Well, it's been nearly a month since I did anything to move my book project forward. Sure, I can sit back and hope that the few letters and inquiries will suffice, but frankly, that's an exceptionally dumb strategy, as odds are so not in my favor. I should not place faith in a small  handful of letters, even if the occasional one is warmly received. Warmth does not a contract make.  I have got to keep on plugging away and so this afternoon, I plug away.

And honestly, everything today is about work.  It's as if I had rejoined the world of the employed, only without a paycheck to show for it. (Not yet, anyway.)

I hope you felt equally productive in whatever task you took on today. Success should be measured not by outcomes but by what you attempt to do on any given day, don't you think?

good work

Waking up to a dreary and cold day is just fine if you have a clear and clean day before you: no work demands, no doctors' appointments, no pesty paperwork that needs your immediate attention. How wonderful is that!

Yes, it's a kitchen breakfast -- why move dishes to the southern front room or eastern sun room, when the clouds are equally dense no matter which way you look?



(wild hair)


It's a good day to return to my writing, to put in solid hours of reading, but I'm not ready for it just yet.  I walk out into the brisk air, thinking that it's time to switch out of my light fleece and into something more substantial.

At the other side of the barn, I hear the noise of birds and so I pause to watch. A cloud of them is hovering above, waiting to swoop down for a last feast on anything that the still soft ground may offer.



(birds against a gray sky)


How is it that they are able to fly in unison? As if startled, they swoop up and away.

At lunch time, I remind Ed of the mouse (no. 7!) that needs to be let loose in a more distant field.



(over lunch)





(looking out the kitchen window)

So long as I'm going out with the mouse, want to go vote?
Good plan!
So long as we're out voting, want to play tennis?
Well now, that's an interesting idea. It's rather cold. Forties maybe. But the sun is emerging! It's going to be a nicely bright afternoon. Why not?!

We play an energetic game! Reading a number of articles recently about older people (that would be Ed and me!) and their loss of mobility and balance reminds me that he and I haven't a huge number of tennis years left. Better improve my game now, or forever stay relegated to the low end of mediocrity!

At the secret, woodsy tennis court, I warm up almost instantly. And of course, the more you skip and hop about outdoors, the more you're motivated to skip and hop some more. And so, after returning home, I take on the winter garden.



(bird against a blue sky)


When you imagine a winter garden, you have to envision all the dry plants and flowers and decide which texture would look best under a blanket of snow. Of course, when the snow cover is deep, it hardly matters -- it all collapses under its weight. But initially, you can do a lot to create something original and splendid. And so I weave through the flower beds, pruning and clipping, doing what I can in the one afternoon I have allocated to this task. Hydrangea puffs stay. Monarda -- clip off. Lavender -- without question stays. Coreopsis -- ugly as anything when it's dry and spent. Off it goes. And so on.



(hydrangea)


The cheepers are with me now and Ed reminds me how mellow Oreo has become.
That's because I avoid him! I protest. Besides, you never know!
We'd read about another strategy for dealing with a rooster who aggresses against people:  chase the bugger to give him some of his own medicine! Flap your 'wings' and wave a stick! I am skeptical, but so long as the chicken mama is not coming by to get him, he is here and truth be told, he is acting a lot tamer than when I first came back from Europe.
But when people come....
I'll lock him up.
And when there is a toddler... But I don't end that sentence. That's miles away from now. Who knows what the cheeper story will be when we get to that era.











So I work outside, and the cheepers watch, and Ed comes out occasionally to help, and it is such a good way to spend a November afternoon! It truly is as grand as a spring day when your hands get dirty, and your clogs get muddy, but the smell of wet earth clears your head, and the stiffness in your shoulder recedes, and your cheeks are cool, and your soul is as warm as the air on the warmest of warm summer days.

the last day

At breakfast, I tell Ed -- if we still have outdoor work to do this year, this is the last day to do it. Afterwards, it'll be tough. 






There is one task that has to be done, and there's another that should be done, and there's a third that Ed has offered to do to help my daughter at her place. Our plate is full.

I tackle the "should" -- mowing. Especially the front yard, to mulch down the maple leaves.






It really does help the yard and it makes my work in spring that much easier. Raking half frozen leaves that blow onto my flower beds is tough work. And so Ed brings out the Zero Turn and I get to it.

There are two issues that plague me with the Zero Turn (and, too, with the tractor that we sometimes use for the tough, rutted hills out back): first of all, the jostling and turning has the same effect on my gut as a sailboat would. In rough waters. And secondly -- I overdo it. Once I get going, I don't stop. Because really, the raspberries need a shave and a cut, and the creeping charlie has to be pushed back, and the grasses around the writer's shed are too tall, and the prairie needs a trim along the edges... A good trim keeps the mice at bay, right?  [Farmhouse caught mouse count so far this year: six! At some point it will taper off to near zero, but right now, they're desperate to find warm shelter for the winter.]

I needed a good hour to recover after the mowing.

Next on my list -- helping Ed with the move of the coop. He has cleared out a nice spot in the old barn (the one that has too good a ventilation system, what with missing boards and cracks every which way you look -- but still, it has a solid roof and it is better than having the coop face the winds and snow outside). We carry the coop to a place by the barn entrance...

 


... and pile bales of hay at two sides for further insulation.

The cheepers are puzzled. Even though they often hang out in the barn and even though they lived just on the other side of the barn wall, the move of their roosting place is disconcerting.






Eventually though, they turn the unfamiliar into the familiar by claiming pecking rights to the hay -- a funny statement on their part, since the hay has been in the barn all the while and they never before showed any interest in it.

Move done.






Cheepers protected. Or at least more protected than before. If we have Polar Vortex situations this year, we'll have to heat the coop, but for now, they should be set, even if the temps reach levels significantly below freezing. (Their water dish has to be plugged in and the eggs have to be picked up pronto, but otherwise, the winter residence is up and running.)






Finally, we go over to my daughters, where Ed helps change some of the electricals. It's outdoor work again and I resist being a nuisance and play with the cats instead.






We return before five and it is shocking to see how dark it is at this hour. I turn on the porch twinkly lights. They'll stay on for all of winter.

week-end's end

Well, it's a new day, but my foot is still stuck a little in the old one. Events like my daughter's shower define not only a given day, but, too, the weeks (months?) that precede it and, at least to some extent, the days that follow. And, just as the wedding this June had set the farmette (and me in it) spinning, so, too, this gathering invigorated my surroundings and my attention to them. In such a good way!

Immediately after the shower, I wanted, of course, to put things in order again: to return the extra chairs to Ed's sheep shed, to throw the tablecloths and napkins in the washing machine, to put in the recycling bin all that paper and cardboard, to freeze leftovers and wipe down surfaces. And I did most of it last night (with some help, of course). And I finished it off this morning.

My younger girl and her husband, exhausted from months of work and the long drive down from Minneapolis, slept soundly and late today, despite the extra hour thrown in by the gracious time change. I was so happy for that down time they found in the little upstairs room in the farmhouse!

And now is the time to repeat quickly a run down of this place, because I know I have new readers who don't quite know the farmhouse as intimately as you long time friends do.

The farmhouse is about 100 years old. It was a dairy and sheep farmstead once and for a very many years it was in disrepair. The original barn burned down and the neighbors say the fire smoldered in the silo for years. The farming family by then had neither the means nor the interest to do much about it. The framers had children here and that in itself must have been difficult. The house is small by modern standards: two bedrooms upstairs, kitchen and living/dining area downstairs and an unfinished basement. Over the years, they tried to add space by enclosing the front porch (what I call the front room -- we eat breakfast there sometimes, as it faces south) and then by adding an east annex (what I call the sun room), but they finished neither and eventually they moved out and subsequent dwellers continued to neglect the place.

Many years passed before I agreed to take on the project of renovating the house -- it basically filled me with despair every time I looked inside. But, we did it and we finished it off last summer, when Ed screened a back porch and we put glass panels on its roof to create more light throughout. Seventeen glass panels. It was an extraordinary act of farmhouse love and of determination to get things right.

Were we to build from scratch, we would never design the farmhouse in the way that it's laid out: a living room with only one outside wall and the rest -- with doorways to other spaces. However, given this quirkiness, it does have a virtue that few old farmhouses have: the added spaces and the kitchen have a huge number of windows. And so despite it all, the place reeks of sunlight. Moreover, if you stand by the kitchen entryway, you can actually look out through windows facing every exposure: north, west, south and east. Remarkable.

Here's a general view of the living room and the front room and the sun room this morning as I come down:






Ed and I eat a quiet breakfast together.






And later, much later, the young couple appears and we have a wonderful set of minutes when no one has any thing they have to do, or any place they have to be just yet.






And then, one more final meal together -- brunch this time, with my two girls, their husbands and my older one's friend who came down from D.C. for the shower.





That's a dreamy set of minutes. Over food, unrushed, happy with the way the weekend had proceeded.

And then it is time for the out-of-towners to leave, though I do pose for one  last weekend photo: just me and my girls. Together. (Yep, I'm the shortest.)





At home, the laundry is done, the house is still shining. Or maybe it's that the days' shine just sunk into those plaster walls and stayed.

The cheepers appear happy with the sudden quiet here. Or maybe they're happy that I'm home. Or maybe they're just happy to be out and about on a cold but sunny November day. As usual, I can't read cheeper thoughts.



(Where have you been??)


For supper -- Ed and I eat leftovers. Of course. [Footnote here in answer to Qs: all salads, including the roasted squash and lentils, are from online recipes at the ever wonderful smittenkitchen.com]

Shower under a clear blue sky

Oh, I was up early! By 4 I was straining to see if maybe daylight would soon be with us. No, not yet.

My little girl arrived with her husband at the farmette somewhere in the middle of the night. Realizing they were there, in the other little room upstairs -- made me smile. Yeah, this weekend is going to be special

Finally, daylight!

Food preparation. Now, let's get going! The baby shower for my older girl starts at 1. We've got two dozen people to feed. So much to do still!

Wait, a pause for breakfast. Never proceed without breakfast.






Now, onwards!

I have the help of the shower co-sponsor. Thank God. I need it.






Okay. Quiches, cakes come in from the bakeries. Salads almost finished.


 



Tables set.












And on this brilliant (but cold!), sunny day, the shower begins.






We eat. Oh, do we eat!






There's a game, and there are baby gifts. And this is when the life of the baby becomes very real. We all sit back and imagine her --  swaddled, playing, crying, sucking, laughing, listening to a story.






The hours fly.

The party ends.

My girls' husbands come and my girls review the events, admire once more the gifts of gold. Because the little books, onesies, towels, carriers, pillows are gifts of gold -- to help these new parents move their kid from total infant to a crawling walking taking tyke. Or in this case -- tykette.











Ed and Issie boy come back. The rooster, kept behind the fence all afternoon, is set free.






Evening. We eat take out Thai, we watch movies. The house is so warm! Positively fired up and glowing. The old farmhouse that has seen too many stories, saw one more today. And it was a good one.



...the little one




...with the bigger one, who in turn has a little one

cooking

I listen to a record from my past today. Many, many times. I got it decades ago -- I don't remember how or why. It's about children.

My day today is devoted to cooking for my daughter's Saturday shower, at the same time that I have ongoing communications with my sister over details of administrative matters we're attending to in Poland (or rather she is attending to, since I am merely a shadow to these transactions). And so I jump between Poland and the shower and my girls and the girl that's about to be born and in fact, it's not a great leap at all.

I especially love one song on the record (it's a vinyl!), even as these days, it makes me cry. Each time. Total nostalgia. Click here to listen (and ignore the unfortunate photo someone used for the youtube link. The record actually has lovely sketches of children on it.)

Here's the real record cover, dating back to 1975:






I'll post the lyrics throughout today's entry. Polish pop music was, in those decades, very sensual and poetic. Quite different than what you'd be hearing here in the 70s. The translations are my own.


Dziewczyno, żono zakochana
Dziewczyno przy nadziei
Popatrz dokoła, jak od rana
Świat się do ciebie śmieje

[Young woman, wife -- in love
Young woman with hope
Look around you, from early morning
The world is smiling at you]

Jesteś - idąca miejskim świtem -
Natchnieniem tego wiersza
W swojej sukience śpiesznie szytej
W swojej sukience śpiesznie szytej
Najpiękniejsza

[You are - walking in the city's predawn -
The inspiration for this poem
In your dress, hurriedly sewn
In your dress, hurriedly sewn
The most beautiful]



(we wake up to a dusting of snow)


Dziewczyno, żono, przyszła mamo
Dziewczyno, mamo przyszła
Która oglądasz siebie samą
W lustrach ulicznych wystaw

[Young woman, wife, future mother
Young woman, mother of tomorrow
You, who looks at herself
in the mirrors of store windows]

I myślisz, idąc białym światem
Ach, kiedyż będę lżejsza
Ty jesteś zimą, wiosną, latem
Ty jesteś zimą, wiosną, latem
Najpiękniejsza

[You think, as you walk in the predawn light
Oh, when will I be lighter
You are in the winter, spring and summer
You are in the winter, spring and summer
The most beautiful]



(breakfast, with Ed and his visiting co-op days friend)


Na naszym piętrze nowina
Na naszym piętrze nowina
Już niedługo u sąsiadów
Już niedługo u sąsiadów
Narodzi się, narodzi się
Narodzi się dziecina

[On our floor, there' s news
On our floor, there's news
Soon at our neighbor's
Soon at our neighbor's
A child will be born, will be born
Will be born]





(looking out the kitchen window as I cook)


Dziewczyno, zakochana żono
Mąż twoje włosy gładzi
Na niebie dobre gwiazdy płoną
I ludzie są wam radzi

[Young woman, wife in love
Your husband smooths your hair
In the sky, the good stars shine down on you
And the world is your friend]




(fennel blood orange walnut salad)


Wyszywasz kwiaty na fartuchu
I czekasz dnia powicia
Mąż ukląkł przy twym pełnym brzuchu
Mąż ukląkł przy twym pełnym brzuchu
Słucha życia

[You sew flowers on your apron
And you wait for the day
Husband kneels by your full stomach
Husband kneels by your full stomach
And listens to life]




(carrot tahini chick pea pistachio salad)


Na naszym piętrze nowina
Na naszym piętrze nowina
Już niedługo u sąsiadów
Już niedługo u sąsiadów
Narodzi się, narodzi się
Narodzi się dziecina

[On our floor, there' s news
On our floor, there's news
Soon at our neighbor's
Soon at our neighbor's
A child will be born, will be born
Will be born]


Tomorrow is a very full day, but I'll be back with at least a quick synopsis. Bitter cold out there tonight. Stay snug!