Thursday - 307th

Cloudy with a threat of storms. There, does that sound like a day you'd like to spend outside? Oh, I have nothing against snow storms. In fact, since retirement (to say nothing of isolation), I have to admit to liking them. And we need to keep that snow base thick and packed if Ed and I are to continue skiing. But, we are hovering just at freezing, and if I'm reading the weather maps correctly, we're likely to get some drizzle and ice before we get to the snow part. So, yukky weather, at least for the bulk of the day.

Does that mean we are housebound once again?  No it does not. We simply flip the day, giving ourselves an outing early, right after my walk to feed the animals...

(the cheepers are totally confused as to how to treat this day: out of the barn, back to the barn, out again... what's a chicken to do???)

 

... and of course, after breakfast.

And in fact, preparing breakfast gives me an idea: I have all this beautiful fruit right now. Wouldn't it be good to drop some over at my daughter's house? Sure, she has fruits too, but I have these fantastic strawberries (it's rare to have fantastic strawberries in January) and remarkable CSA carrots! I prepare a plate...

... and Ed and I drive it over to their place (the sitter is in charge)...

(I'm not sure Sparrow is thrilled with these seconds-long through the door visits!)

And after, we drive over to the nearby Owen Woods for a short hike. It's a nice change from our usual.

By late morning, we are home again and I retreat to my writing. For a few hours. And then I pause. If a storm is coming, I should at least try to get the last storm's snow load off the porch roof. It can't be too hard, right?

I climb out the bathroom window onto the roof, shovel in hand and immediately I can tell this is not my best idea. The snow is wet and heavy and the glass below is as slick as I've seen it. The only way I can keep from crashing down in a slip and slide is if I balance on the inch-wide strips of wood between the glass panes.Impossible? No, not that, but difficult. After two slips (but no fall!) I almost give up. But, I'm up there, I may as well persevere.

And now that I am safely back on the couch, I can say I'm glad I did it. The kitchen is always that much brighter with the porch roof cleared. Too, if the pileup is too great, it stays there and stays there and stays there, all the way til the end of March. But, the writing mood passed and I am left once more to piddling my way through the rest of the afternoon.

Here's a very welcome interruption!

A sweet and wonderful cap, or almost cap to the evening. It can't be all good news all the time, can it.. I have a message from someone I care deeply about of a COVID exposure, so that's on my mind. But of course, in some way, it's on all our minds as we count the days until all this is behind us.

With love...

Wednesday - 306th

I had decided that one day of the week has to be a grab-bag-of-stuff day. A little of this, a little of that. Throw it in, pile it on. Otherwise, tasks accumulate, the car gas tank empties out, dust gathers. And, importantly, visits with grandkids (over Zoom) are tougher to coordinate. So I set aside Wednesdays for everything that has piled up and also as the day when I can touch base (over Zoom) with Snowdrop.

Initially, I had thought that I would use this time to give her a chance to vent, complain, act out, do whatever it is that she wants to do to let off steam. But, it surely appeared to me that her steam levels are okay! No need to act out. The smile is there, our visit is sweet.

All this came later. In the morning, there was breakfast...

Followed by a lengthy writing session in a coffee shop atmosphere. Meaning there is a low buzz of noise in the background as Ed and I keep an eye on Congressional hearings shown live on our TV screen. It's funny how in general, I cannot write when there are noises and movements in the farmhouse. Ed taps a couch and I look up, train of thought interrupted. The phone rings for him? I lose my concentration. But Congressional hearings? Coffee shop noise. No problem.

After my hour-long chat with Snowdrop, I do the rest of Wednesday chores. Including picking up spinach from our CSA delivery site.

(lovely views on the drive there: snow on fields of corn, geese, and a disappearing sun.)

 

 

I wanted to use this outing to put myself on city streets once again. Perhaps take a walk along the lesser lake, which is quite close to my spinach pickup. It isn't a great day for a walk. We are just above freezing and there is an occasional drizzle. Yuk. Moreover, I am spoiled by the emptiness of park trails. There are too many people on city streets and way too many of them are without masks. 

Instead of my city saunter, I pause the car just before reaching home. How about at least a thousand or two steps in the far reaches of the undeveloped-as-yet new development? It's pretty now, at the time of sunset. And quiet.

Later still I bake a frittata. Spinach, mushrooms, potato, cheese.  A  wonderful dish for a winter day that seems otherwise to be a little too damp, too gray, too dark too early.

Twinkling porch lights, a soft, ever so light fragrance of pine from my candle, a warmth that feels so good on a yukky weather day.

Tuesday - 305th

Two competing sides, presenting strong arguments, fighting for scarce resources.  So which side should win?

The first says -- what a beautiful day! Seize it. Go outside and collect your vitamin D. Sunshine has been rare this month. When it delivers winter blue skies and a sheen and sparkle to the snowy fields, we should be right out there, taking it all in.

(It doesn't quite start out sunny: it's a misty morning, but with promise.)

("What's our game plan for today? Barn? Venture out?")

(Ed comes down for breakfast, but is then called away to a work issue. Still, we overlap a little.)

The second side says: you got a good start on doing a final rewrite of your book. There will be sunshine in future days, but you have struggled to immerse yourself in this project for years now. You've immersed yourself yesterday -- return to it while the going's good. 

So who does win? Where would you place your bets?

Ah, the art of compromise... In the end, I return to the rewrite. I am so darn focused on getting it done that I will not make excuses for myself. It's now or never! At the same time, a late afternoon saunter on skis can still be accommodated. And not just your single loop in the county park...

We fit two loops in! We are richly rewarded: at around 3, those who wanted to ski or hike in sunshine will have done so already, at the same time that the dog walkers are not yet out there for their pre-dusk walk. And so we have this corner of the park to ourselves.

And it's beautiful.

(close up...)

(Driving home, pausing to say hi to our friends...)

So compromise is possible and in the end both sides win. How about that. Who would have guessed that sometimes, you can have your cake and wolf it down too. A smaller portion perhaps, but it's there, to be divided, a wee piece for one, a wee piece for the other. Yum.

Monday - 304th

Time to launch the new schedule. An early wake up, a spirited sprint to feed the animals, and a walk the (once again clouded over) farmette lands...

And a relatively early breakfast. So early, in fact, that I was going to leave poor Ed to his dozy state upstairs and eat alone...

... but he heard the commotion in the kitchen and so in the end I had company for the morning meal.

And then I returned to my Great Writing Project. As you may remember, it is a childhood memoir. My younger years may have been unremarkable, but I lived in interesting places and at interesting times and so I began the effort of putting it all into a story form many many years ago. I've rewritten each chapter quite a number of times. Too many to count. Not too long ago, I concluded that I only needed to do one more rewrite of the final chapter and I'd be done, but now I'm thinking I cannot get away with just that. As you get older, you may lose a clear recollection of the details of your younger years, but I'm not too worried about that. I've recorded the details. What does change over time is the way you look at them and think about them. You gain perspective. Your understanding of what took place decades ago keeps adjusting. Like a camera lens, where you take more of the blur out with each year.

Perhaps the inevitable conclusion is that it's best to write your memoir the day before you keel over.

At the very least, it's best to review your childhood after a sufficient number of years have passed so that you can develop some distance from what took place. Caveat: be sure to do it before your brain cells lose their capacity to process an overabundance of information, and before they lose their flex, so that you can no longer forge perceptive linkages between what you see before you and what took place a long time ago.

Of course, it's impossible for anyone to fully realize that they're teetering on the brink of dottyness, but I think I'm not there yet. Still, today I reopened my text with renewed determination.  And I made some changes to the first two chapters. Of course I did. I cannot reread that damn thing without making some changes.

In the afternoon, Ed and I went skiing. We have a small window for this now: the snow is getting a little thin in some spots and we expect a two day warmup in midweek. So we ski, against a bracing wind and it's wonderful!

(we take the trail that runs close to Lake Waubesa)

And the sun sets and I feel that today was not wasted on too much reading. Evening now. Time to click on all those email links and see what's happening in this world.

Sunday - 303rd

There comes a time in January when I start thinking about spring. It's the month when I take out the plant and seed catalogues and click on favorite gardening websites. This year I have a whole new space to plant -- to the east of the farmhouse, where trees once shaded a large patch of land, but the trees have been taken down by Ed and the soil is ready for spring planting. Looking at my records from past years, I see that I always put in my first plant orders now, in January. Nevertheless, this year, my head isn't there yet. I'm stuck in winter thoughts.

I try to give myself a little push. For example, this week I started purchasing tulips for the kitchen table. My grocery store sells inexpensive bunches of tulips year round, but I scoff at the idea of putting out a vase of these guys say in November. In my mind, tulips are harbingers of spring and I allow myself the pleasure of looking at them once the countdown to spring begins. So let's think about the coming of spring! Here you go: pink tulips for breakfast!

It doesn't fully work. One foot solidly stuck in winter. I'll give myself another nudge next week. We'll see how that goes.

(It doesn't help that once again we are in a spell of low lying clouds. Spring thoughts do not respond well to a dense cloud cover.)

And I have this further insight about my days right now: I'm too well-read.

When the kids were coming to the farmhouse, in the time I was tending to them (on average five hours each day), I never once looked at my online reading material. I read stuff in the early morning and then again in the evening. In between -- I'd at most check headlines to make sure the planet was still spinning in the way that it's supposed to. Sometimes not even that. My mind was clear of worldly thoughts. 

But now -- well, I subscribe to three paid publications and each one sends me fascinating emails all day long with links to their most interesting stories.  A lot of it is news analysis: I know every detail about the insurrection in D.C., plus what every smart person has to say about it and what us average folk think about it and, too, I know what other news sources abroad and here, all over the political spectrum are saying about it, because my three publications delve into all that as well. Similarly, I have a huge knowledge base about COVID -- its origins, progression, treatment, future prognosis, current implications. And the vaccines: how they came to be, who is getting them, who is rebelling against them and for what reason. And that's not all. As I am rifling through these online pages, I come across other stories that catch my eye. For instance, did you know that "the polar vortex is splitting in two, which may lead to weeks of wild winter weather?" (WashPo, Jan.5). Or, why would I not click on this link: "New Pandemic-Related Emojis For the Next Keyboard Update?" (New Yorker, today. Actually, they're pretty funny! Go look at them here!)

So my five hours with the kids has shifted to one hour of better cleaning and bookkeeping and four hours of online reading.

This has to stop. Beginning tomorrow, I'm coming back to the days of childcare model: I will read what I can read before breakfast and return to it in the evening, in between cooking dinner, and writing an Ocean post, and eating popcorn over a movie with Ed (last night's Peanut Butter Falcon was fiercely entertaining!). A little tight, but I did it before and I can do it again! Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to read a piece I came across about why resolutions are doomed to fail...)

Later:

In the afternoon, Snowdrop calls. What are you doing? 

I'm baking a rhubarb cake. (In looking through our frozen fruits and veggies, I came across a large bag of rhubarb. That's right! I'd forgotten I chopped boatloads of stalks back in the summer. It struck me that I could do more than just cook up a dinner for the young family once a week. I could bake a cake! They are once again stuck in their house, with too few hours of childcare and too much work on their plates.) What are you doing?

I'm walking a cat on a leash. 

They have three cats. Could it be that one of them is now a victim of an eager girl's play story?

Gaga, it's just pretend.

I hear meowing.

It's got batteries!

I return to my cake.  

Food delivery! 

Such good kids...

Evening. Ed dozes on the couch. We didn't ski today, but we took a brisk walk -- enough to knock him out now. I finish up cooking our portion of the same supper the young family eats. 

A new week starts tomorrow. Think it'll be a good one? Sure. Keep the hope!

Saturday - 302nd

As I lay awake this morning, waiting to see if we would be lucky enough to see sunshine today, I thought about our cross country skiing options. Weekends are tricky. It's hard to avoid people on any of the groomed trails. But of course, we do not have to stick to groomed trails. Snow is snow. You can take your skiing habit anywhere. Downhill skiing is more limited. Cross country frees you to explore a greater range of winter landscapes.

All these thoughts of skiing made me wonder when I last skied down a mountainside. Didn't I return to my beloved Cervinia in the Alps just a few years ago? Didn't I lure Ed to a downhill slope near our home also just a couple of winters past? I checked Ocean: oh how time flies! My return to Cervinia was in March, 2007. The nearby Tyrol Basin -- my last downhill run -- was in February 2014. Why haven't I gone anywhere since? 

I read my posts from Cervinia. It was a dangerously windy set of days. At many points in the day the gondolas carrying skiers up closed for safety reasons. Nonetheless, I made it to the top of the mountain ridge and skied down into Switzerland. Then up by gondola and back down into Italy. I got knocked down by an out of control skier and nonetheless I kept on going, even though I was bruised and shaken.

Most of my Polish friends (who were in fact my first skiing buddies) still continue to ski (though not this year -- the pandemic wiped the season out for them). They are older than me (I was a wee young one in our cohort) and yet they still ski. Why have I retreated?

At the end of the day, downhill skiing is, in my view, a social thing. Even if you do a solo run down a miles long slope, you like to meet up with someone eventually and ride up with them to the summit again. And more importantly, after a day of skiing, you're dying for company. Perhaps not the rowdy apres-ski stuff that some young people relish, but just to have a good hot meal with your beloveds -- friends or family -- to cap a day of adventure. I stopped downhill skiing because return trips to beautiful mountains always depleted my travel budget even as at the end of each skiing day, I was lonely and not too happy.

I do miss the mountains in the winter. But I can't see myself returning to ski them. That image of a dinner alone after a day on the slopes keeps me away.

So, was there sunshine on this day? Well, my morning walk did reveal clouds, but of course there are clouds and then there are cloud covered skies. Recently, when I had complained to Snowdrop that we have had too many cloudy days in a row, she protested. Clouds are pretty! -- she reminded me. It's true, but days and days of dismally gray skies did not show off any clouds, just darkness and an absence of sunshine. So today is different. Take a look:

Actual clouds and in between, a glimmer of hope. Not sunshine exactly, but close to it.

Breakfast. Very late.

Immediately after I get a Zoom call from Sparrow. His sister has gone off on a bird watching expedition and I guess the little guy needed a pick-me-up. There he is, chortling away as always.'

His sister comes back home right as we are finishing one of his favorite books. Yes, it's grand to see the both of them again.

And then Ed and I do go cross country skiing and every few minutes we happily spot a splash of sunlight, before the clouds cover it up again.

And yes, our friends are in the fields, giving us a friendly stare...

I'm thinking, maybe next year we'll take all the grandkids skiing. Snowdrop and Primrose are real ice gliders. Sparrow? Well, maybe he'll watch from the sidelines. With his baby sibling. And our resident deer.

Friday - 301st

Seriously? You're vacuuming? On a weekday? This was Ed's reaction when he saw me run the machine under the couch. I know what you're doing. You're filling your hours with busy work.

He is wrong. I'm just vacuuming because it hasn't been done for a couple of weeks and I can see from afar all that accumulates underneath the furniture. It's really remarkable: popcorn, okay, I get that. But feathers and buttons? Who even wears anything with tiny buttons around here? Oh, oops: Snowdrop and her tiny sweaters.

Well he's wrong anyway!

The early morning walk had been a little chaotic. We have the usual below freezing temps and what seem to be the ever present gray clouds, but the fog has lifted and I guess the animals prefer the dry winter air because they are all out and about, including the cheepers.

 

(the younger crew...) 

 That's well and good, but the old girls quickly get disoriented in the snow.

 

(the elderly hens, lead by Tuxie the cat)

I find myself carrying Java (the oldest and calmest) to the garage to rejoin the young ones there. I try hustling the others to follow. To no avail. Ah well, as Ed says, at the end of the day, all chickens end up on the barn wall.

 

Over breakfast, we talk chickens. It has come to this.

 

 

 

 

Vacuuming isn't the only catch up activity on my list for today. Budgets -- mine, my mom's -- emails, I mean, I'm sure your imagination allows you to think of all that can pile up if you've just spent five weeks doing few if any of your household jobs. 

Ed and I do go skiing, this time along a trail that isn't part of the park system, or at least not the park that is our favorite haunt. I offer a mild protest. There is, in my view, nothing pretty here -- no forest, no prairie. In the summer, the path abuts the wetlands. In the winter, well, there are a few trees, a few scraggly bushes, and lumpy patches of frozen ground. Too, it is just close enough to Madison's Sewage plant that I swear I can smell the stuff every now and then, when a stiff breeze brings it our way. (Ed claims I'm making it up and that there is no smell. He is wrong.)

Still, I agree that one must occasionally vary the repertoire and the end destination here -- a bridge over a stream -- is pretty enough. We pause for a while and discuss if the swimming bird is a duck or a goose. Let's just call it a guck.

 

 

 

 

By dusk, I am home. In time for these two!

Great plans for the remaining winter months have not been hatched yet. I offer no excuses. It could be that they will never be formed let alone hatched. It could be that I'll spend too much time reading news analyses and by spring my eyes (to say nothing of my brain) will be glazed over by virtue of an over- abundance of screen time. 

You never know what the next day will bring, right? We could all be pleasantly surprised.

Thursday - 300th

300 days of isolation! Crazy, no? Still, we are safe. 

This morning -- a gray, misty, cold, icy morning once again...

 

 

 

... with a late breakfast...

... I kept thinking about a passage from a book I read a long long time ago. I was 12 then and mostly liked the romance books that I picked up at the very tiny Young Adult section of the New York Public Library. But, we were soon to return to Poland and so I actually purchased this one book, a nonfiction story (written by Marie Killilea) about raising a daughter with a disability. That part -- about caring for a disabled child -- was powerful enough, but something else in her narrative really made an impression on me: the author presented a beautiful depiction of family life.  Every day stuff. I was enthralled. 

There was one little snippet from that book that came back to me today: it's where she describes the time after the departure of her older adopted daughter. It was a simple scene: the girl, young woman really, had left to live elsewhere (with her new husband I think). The house was suddenly very empty. Marie writes how she takes out the leaf from the dining table, no longer needed now that the family is that much smaller. And this just proved to be the wrong thing to do: the physical act of accommodating in this way the shrunken family unravels her completely.

Because I am remembering so vividly this passage from the book, I do not put away stuff that is here, at the farmhouse for the pleasure of the kids. I'll do it -- I'll tidy up spaces, perhaps redecorate their play space, put away the books they have been demanding all December long, but not today. Not the first day of an empty house.

Still, the farmhouse is small and the telltale signs of the kids' presence are everywhere. And each time I see a flash of one item or the next -- the rose on Snowdrop's placemat, the soup pot filled by Sparrow with plastic veggies, the markers used just yesterday by the little girl -- the feeling of sudden loss washes over me.

But, I'm busy. For one thing, I have a Zoom party with my Polish friends, all properly horrified at the news from this side of the ocean.

 

 

And then later, toward evening, Ed and I do a ski run. No rush today, just a nice easy glide through the prairie and into the forest.

And so the day passes. Will all my winter days be equally slow, equally without new ideas? To avoid a slide into the feeling of sameness, where each day is just like the next or the one before it, I made a list of projects. Looking at it now, I'm thinking few of the items are any fun. They sound like the laborious stuff that I should have been attending to all along, except that I had this excuse: the kids.

Perhaps tomorrow's job will be to come up with a better list!