Saturday - 127th

It's a sizzler. A charbroiled jalapeno pepper of a day. Hot hot hot.

There is a breeze in the morning. A sticky one. Not unlike putting yourself next to one of those hand drying machines in a public restroom. Still, it has the effect of dispersing some of the bugs outside. I work in the garden without the help of the paddle bug zapper.

I don't quite get to 1000 spent lilies, but it was close.

(The lily bed by the porch has all the challenges, successes, mistakes, and ultimately beauty of gardening right smack in its belly.)






(Flowers, everywhere...)





I pluck the last lily just as all hell breaks loose. Rain, lightening, thunder, you name it.

I want to eat breakfast on the porch. It's dry on the porch. Not even that hot, what with the rain outside.
Can we get struck by lightening out here? I should know better than to ask Ed.
Maybe, he says to taunt me. We might be that one person in the calendar year that gets hit by lightening in Wisconsin.

Fine. We eat on the porch.





But when a huge crash shakes the earth beneath us, I take my coffee inside.

And then I return to my writing project. I have this day and tomorrow before I resume childcare. I'm motivated. I lose myself in the text.

In the afternoon, Ed asks if I want to break for a walk. Of course I do. I need movement to keep me excited about sitting still for so long!

We get on his motorbike and head out to our park. You know the one -- with prairies and woods and a lake at its edge. We stick to the prairie to avoid mosquitoes. And mercifully, the deer ticks are finished for the season. It's a sticky hot and beautiful walk!

(monarda, everywhere...)





(What we pass, on our way home...)





And then it's more writing for me until finally, toward evening, I say to Ed -- I'm done with the next to last chapter. Two dozen more pages and I'm completely finished.  He shakes his head.
It's your white whale, he tells me. You're chasing something, obsessively, but you'll never get it.

I tell him that literary allusions, even to such obvious texts as Moby Dick, are a mean way to remind me for missing years of literature classes in both the US and Poland. In my adolescence, I bounced between the two countries and skipped several grades to boot and so you could say that somewhere along the way, I missed most literature and grammar schooling in both countries. I feel those gaps every time I sit down to write.
You have had many dozens of years to make up those gaps, he reminds me.

I so dislike it when he is right and it is my fault.

Fine, my white whale. It's nearing an end, even though, according to Ed, it will always be out of my reach.


(Late afternoon colors...)






(Evening pinks...)





I cook a frittata for dinner. I feel it's been a while, no? With a new CSA box, I really need to start pushing those veggies. This particular frittata, in addition to the eggs and cheeses, has string beans (both green and yellow), corn kernels, garlic scapes, garlic cloves, a potato, mushrooms and basil. The proportion of veggies to eggs (there are seven eggs in all) is... large.






A July night. We toy with the idea of opening the windows for the night, but it's still just too hot.

May your world be perfectly cool tonight. May you sleep well and stay healthy in the weeks to come!

Friday - 126th

It's going to be a hot weekend here, in south-central Wisconsin. Starting now. Or perhaps even before "now." I wasn't focused on the weather the past few days. It all just passed me by.


(Probably the best view of the Big Bed in its entirety is from the bathroom. Meaning as you sit on the toilet and contemplate life. And the four chickens sitting on the bench outside. Who knew chickens lounged on benches?)





I'm up to do my usual rounds. Animals and gardens, in that order. It's unfortunately very buggy in these early hours. The deer flies are gone (thank God), but the mosquitoes are having a good revival. And we are standing still with our spraying. Ed will ask -- should I spray with the garlic oils now?
I'll respond -- maybe not today. I've already done my work outside.
Tomorrow then?
Maybe we should wait until it gets even worse? It's not as bad as some years...
So no?
So yes! Maybe tomorrow?

And so we toss the decision back and forth and in the meantime I suffer. Not greatly, but moderately. Bzzzz, zap!

It is a given that I am going to clean up the lilies today. I've been away two mornings and this is their heaviest blooming month. Some spent flowers drop naturally, but most just dangle for a few days and they detract from the beauty of the flowers that are having their one day of splendor. So I am out snipping away, filling a bucket with spent lily flowers...





The photos, of course, are after I've made my way through a bed.

And how many lily heads did I snip off today? 1,040! Like the tax form, only different.






I'm sure it's a record, though it's not really a fair number, since some of the spent flowers are from yesterday or possibly the day before. Still, what a difference the removal of 1040 wilted lilies makes!






Sigh... I am lost in the happy world of day lilies. And that's a good thing, because so often these days, the head just swims with worry. The distraction is perfect. Snip and hum the lily songs that I always hum when I do this.






Breakfast, late, on the porch, with Ed, but he looks like he could use a beard trim and a haircut, so I leave him out of the photo and concentrate on the vase of lilies and monarda flowers.






And now for the drumroll: what will she do next on this day of comparative freedom? (The Madison young family is still at the lake today.) Yes, of course, grocery washing. Good. Do it and move on. To what?

To a return to my writing project (aka The Book). I haven't touched it for nearly two years!

You could say that I am on the edit of the final two chapters. It would be true, at least in theory. But the fact is that I always find new editing opportunities and so the thing is slated to never be finished.

I've come to the conclusion that there are two reasons for this constant need to do a rewrite. First, I think my goals have shifted. Initially, it was to be an impressionistic document (Is there such a thing?). I lived through interesting times, this is how they played out in my memory. Only after years of work on The Book did I decide to aim higher: it should be an interesting impressionistic document. I love reading memoirs, but I am too often bored by them. I read and edit them in my mind: this is too underdeveloped, this is too wordy, this is just plain dull. And if I'm going to be harsh with other people's writing, then I need to be even harsher with my own. So I edit. Again and again.

The second reason for the infinite reworkings is that were I to be done, I would have to do something with it. That, to me, is far less interesting than the writing of it. And here's a third problem: were I to be finished, I'd need to decide on the next writing project. I want to go back to short stories, though if you think it's hard to put out a book, try doing something with short stories! Send them to literary journals? Oh, what fun. (Not.) Cracking that box is even harder than cracking your knuckles. (I cannot crack my knuckles, much to Ed's dismay.)

As with everything in life right now, I shall take one day at a time. If and when I finish this 495th edit (it seems that it is at least that), I'll let you know and we can celebrate together. I have some sparklers left over from Snowdrop's five and a half year birthday celebration. True, they leave holes in the tablecloth, but I could sparkle them in safer places. I think. And then we can proceed to  champagne. Are we still allowed to drink champagne, or is it off limits, along with every other pleasurable thing in life right now? [The French have been known to laugh at our obsessive study and discussion of the health benefits, or lack thereof, of foods and beverages. Now of course they're laughing less. They just feel sorry for us. They're popping corks while we're stuck at home worrying that the next glass of wine is going to kill us. Imagine, we're worrying about that glass of wine, even as we can't be bothered with face masks and we find it literally impossible to give up visits to water parks or gyms. We are a strange people.]


In the late afternoon, I connect with my two good friends down south.






We talk for a while. Amazing how much can happen when you're just staying home and trying to keep your groceries clean.





Evening. It's quiet, it's beautiful, it's full of day lilies.

Thursday - 125th

What does it mean to be a hero in a crisis? There's no good answer for this. In a pandemic, front line workers are heroic in keeping us healthy and cared for. On the other hand, I've read enough to know that the label itself -- heroism -- can be a burden. If your mental state is weakened by life's circumstances, or by the pandemic, must you prove your heroism now? Isn't it equally heroic to retreat and take time to recover from the overwhelming burden of acting like a hero during your waking hours?

On the other end of the spectrum, we read about those who act selfishly, protecting their own political might or personal freedoms without sufficient concern for the good of the community. People are all over the place in their response to the pandemic. We anticipated this when there was first mention of a health menace: there would be heroes, but too, there would be those who would, intentionally or unintentionally, completely wreck the chances of getting through this for others. It was bound to happen. It did happen.

Then there's another group -- a set of people that has been on my mind lately. You don't read about them too much because they haven't the burden of contributing to the economy (nor do they slow it down by virtue of their unemployment).  I'm thinking of grandparents. Elderly grandparents. Those over 65 who are retired and who are nonetheless closely connected to their families.

It so happens that all my friends who are grandparents are intimately involved in the lives of their grandchildren. Maybe they can't quite devote the time to childcare that I can, but nonetheless they love their moments with their littlest ones -- over dinners, holidays, get-togethers. Longer weekend visits, school events, spontaneous drop-ins if they live nearby.

Everyone has had a terrible time of it with the pandemic, but I do think one should include in the rubric of the heroic, those many, many grandparents who have had their lives ravaged in profound ways by the pandemic. These people know they must remain under a lock-down. Their kids and grandkids who cannot maintain lock-down rigors have to keep their distance. The way things are going now, with rising rates of infection in most states, it's pretty clear that the isolation of most grandparents will have to continue for a long time.

Imagine this! All that's precious, taken away. And it happens in the years when you love your family more than ever. Years add love. Too, you don't take any of your sweet little guys for granted when you're older. You understand the value of your time with them. You thrive on it, you set your life's calendar by it. All this vanishes, while threats to your longer and more or less healthy life mount and the ease of retirement disappears and your social connectedness dwindles, especially if you're not facile with zoom or some such technologies.

Of course, I've been lucky. Because my kids could maintain jobs in isolation, I could keep on seeing them, even as they've had to be more rigorous in their social distancing toward the rest of the world than the average persons their age. But when schools and daycares become part of their lives once more, I will join the ranks of those grandparents who can do little more than wait for the day when it is again safe to rejoin the world again.

I say all this because I do realize that all my writings about grandkids right now may be especially tough to read if you're a grandparent who has been stranded since mid-March. You could argue that reading about a more normal life is reassuring, but, too, you could argue that it hurts. Or maybe it's a small mix of both. We all like to say "we're in this together," but the reality is that we are all in this in very different ways. I feel terribly sad for those who have lost loved ones. For those who are sick and struggling and will likely continue to struggle with the remnants of this virus for a long time. For those who have lost their jobs, their hope for a good life. For those on the front lines and especially for those who never imagined themselves to be threatened at work by a virus and suddenly they are, and they get few rewards for it -- just a small pay check that barely pays the bills. And for grandparents everywhere, but especially in countries where infection rates are not going down (the US comes to mind). Today, I'm thinking about you. A lot. Especially (but not only) because I, too, will be one of you soon, where being with my most precious little ones and their parents will be a dream and a memory and not part of my everyday.



To return to more lighthearted themes and notes -- today once more belongs to Primrose. (Thank you Snowdrop, for introducing me to the Penguin books by Salina Yoon: Primrose loved them all and surely has them memorized from all the times we read and reread them...)






Breakfast. With peaches. Well, mango too. Love that mango tango!






Tea, with Panda. I didn't even know she had this quintessentially girlie toy (even though Sparrow likes to pour himself a cup too, though I'm never sure if he's just doing it to appear older, like his sister) -- it was neatly tucked away somewhere, but she pulled it out and there we sat. The macarons were also her idea.






Tea, for grandma. All my grandkids know that I have this tea ritual going. Real tea. Every day.






Our good old timed-release selfie!





I suppose every intense set of days has, for me, a musical theme associated with it. Most definitely, the song clipped for you below will forever trigger memories of this visit. Primrose sings it beautifully and right now it's her favorite.

And toward evening, I leave the little girl and my daughter and the whole Chicago family. I need to get home before dark since I can't see a dark highway in the way I could once upon s time, in my long drives across the country.





There are a thousand ways in which I could maybe spend time with the Chicago family again somewhere in the next half year, but none of them are clearly spelled out right now. All I have is my bundle of hopes and my far reaching optimism that this will be possible sooner rather than later. Because the thought of "later" is too tough to stomach.

Leaving was very very hard.

But hey, see you soon little Primrose! Super soon my sweetest little one. Super super soon. I hope.




I pull in to the farmette driveway just as the sun has tucked in its last rays beneath the horizon. The bugs are out, but somehow I can't focus on them. Ed's been holding the fort with the animals. Hmm, the lilies need a trim. I have a couple of days to make progress there. I'll start tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ed -- can we have some popcorn?

Wednesday - 124th

A day with Primrose. That's all the text you need! A day like no other, a day of sweet games, shared meals, many songs. Primrose likes to sing. A day in Chicago, but that's besides the point. We don't go further than her courtyard. She leads, I follow. A day with my youngest granddaughter (Sparrow is my youngest grandson and grandchild, since she beat him to this world by two months!).

[No expansive writing today. I really must go to sleep before the late hours of the night! Besides, your own impressions and interpretations are as important, perhaps more important to you than any that I might foist on you. Do enjoy her spunk, her bounce, her clever stream of questions and explanations. I sure did.]

(my breakfast companion)




(cleaning up)




(what next?)





(the good thing about reading penguin stories is that it provides an opportunity to explain the difference between Antarctica and the North Pole, and that in turn allows you to kick around the whole world for a bit)






(in the courtyard)





(lunch. with panda bear, her new favorite companion. the plastic grapes are his food.)






(post nap, post very long bath, still with panda at her side)






In the evening, the young couple whips up dinner for us all.

You could contemplate the weight of the occasion (last dinner together for who knows how long) and make yourself glum by doing so. Add to it people you know right now undergoing CoVid testing and you could really drive yourself into a tizzy. But that would be dumb. I prefer to line up my inner peace troops and rev them up with articles such as the one in the Washington Post titled "Need Some Good News?...Here are six reasons for optimism." I mean, why take the dark road when there's a lighter path that may in fact bring us to the end of the year with more hope than we've had in a long long time?

A good night to all, wherever you are. Sleep with hope.

And love.

Tuesday - 123rd

I don't have to tell you that nothing about this pandemic is predictable or linear. For Ed and for me, life has a great deal of regularity to it because, of course, as ancient people, we are vulnerable and thus we stay isolated. Completely so: we don't go anywhere.

My daughters, too, have managed isolation. All my grandkids are home with parents and all parents are attempting to do the unimaginable before the pandemic: work and care for kids, all at the same time. No one goes anywhere.

I've been able to help out here in Madison and, too, when my younger girl and her family came up for an extended visit in June, I could look after little Primrose for a bit. But the little Chicago girl may be returning to day care soon, resulting in a break in the family's isolation, so before she does, I most definitely want to see her. And so we arranged for me to do a visit, sandwiched into the middle of the week so that the parents can get some work done while I play with Primrose.

The morning is a regular old July farmette morning: animal care and lily snipping. I don't do a perfect job -- I'm in a hurry, but I do manage to tidy things up a bit.





















Breakfast, with Dance hogging Ed's attention.





And now it's time for me to go.

Normally I would take the bus and then the L train to the young family's home in Chicago, but these are not normal times and there's not a chance that I would put myself on either train or bus, especially now that the virus is surging in Wisconsin. And so I'm back to driving.

I don't like driving. Sometime in the last handful of years, I've stopped enjoying or even half enjoying any long distance driving. Over the decades, I must have done the trip to and through Chicago a thousand times and with eyes closed (so to speak), but now it just seems long and stressful. Still, it's drive or walk, and so I put on the music, adjust my mindset to a positive channel and off I go!

And here's a twist: I do the trip through Milwaukee to avoid the toll road. My Illinois Tollway transponder is obsolete and so I have three options: use local roads, or believe that fines will be waved if I drive through without the little gizmo, or stop by the lake where the Madison young family is vegging out for a while and pick up their transponder. I choose the latter. The bonus is that I get to see the kids for a brief few minutes!






And then I get lost somewhere between lakes and cornfields and industrial sites and small villages. Yes, I do use Google maps, but I swear, the lady doth steer me wrong!

Eventually I do find the highway...






... and I arrive at my daughter's home just a few minutes before Primrose wakes from her nap.






Parents sequester themselves with their work, she and I plunge into play. Inside and outside.






Primrose is at an age when development zips forward at rocket pace. This isn't the little one I saw a month ago. This is a girl who very much has a will and verbal skills to get her to whatever point she is aiming for. Oh, I can still twist her arm and get a selfie out of the deal...





But she definitely is the leader in much of our play!


In the evening, I throw together a quick dinner for us all. Primrose helps.











This is no time to think about how different this day is from when I was last here in February. And indeed, so much has stayed beautifully in place: the home shines, their lives are full of smiles, because despite all the frustrations and stresses that have been thrown in their lap, being around that little girl old brings out laughter. It's inevitable.





In any case, when we are together, we all tend to focus on the good stuff. And we are lucky because thus far, we've all had plenty of good stuff in each day.

The girl sings herself to sleep, the parents and I linger over a glass of one thing or another. It's so luxurious to catch them during an idle moment, indeed -- for them to even create an idle moment.

I am grateful. For all of it. Super grateful.

With love.

Monday - 122nd

Well, so I'm not any more creative than I was three days ago and my French vocabulary hasn't changed either. Three free days morphed into three days of catch up alright, just the wretched type of catch up: taxes, paperwork, and grocery washing. Or some such.

But wait: did my staycation break light any fires at all? Didn't anything leisurely and fine come of it?

Yes! There was plenty to feel good about. For one thing, for three days, there was no hurry. No rush, no anxious race through chores. In fact, I mostly stopped looking at the clock. I forgot about lunch, afternoon coffees, getting up early to feed the animals. The cats and cheepers had to wait. At least the cats appeared to sleep in as well.

Then, too, I did at least some yard clean up work so that I can better enjoy the July lily show.






Hey, how do you like your lilies? Individually? With froggies in them?
















Or en masse?






I try for both of course, but still, the July garden is all about abundance. And a mesmerizing blend of color, dappled all over a canvas. Yes, to me it's as Impressionistic as a Monet painting (or, is it that Monet was made even more brilliant by his gardens in Giverny?).






There is still the unfortunate buzz of deer flies (I had thought earlier that they were horse flies) here on the farmette, but reading up on them tells me they should be fading in a week or two. And that's a good thing: there is no way to get rid of these biting pests, though some hikers swear that wearing a hat helps (the flies love to mess with your head) and, too, their range is short. You can move away from a pestering fly's territory. (And here's another tidbit: hang out with a tall person: the deer fly prefers the tallest moving object! I should, in other words, always garden with Ed.)


Breakfast. Just before noon.






In the afternoon, after most, if not all, paper work is shelved for another time, I suggest we take a walk.

There were two magnificent things about our short hike in the local county park up the road: the blooming prairie...











... and the motorbike ride there and back. The breeze was just right, the air -- filled with the essence of a good summer day. Truly sublime!

(what we saw on our ride back...)






(We could have done without the deer flies during the hike. They've surely made the rounds here, in south central Wisconsin!)


And so yes, I feel mildly regenerated. And that's a good thing, because tomorrow I'm going to Chicago.