Cooling Down

Slowly, the heat is moving on. We didn't get violent storms, which are often the ticket to exiting a heatwave, but we got a little rain. Enough to make me think the plants are all doing fine.

It's a beautiful day -- one where I have to do more clearing and cleaning and pulling and digging, but it's good work, because in spring, the soil is moist, the plants appear well spaced and moving between them is a cakewalk. 

But all eyes are on our spring jewels -- the crab apples and the lilac, now fully in bloom.

Stunning and full of that fresh fragrance that stays with you for years and years. Who doesn't remember their childhood whiff of lilac?!

One foot in spring, the other seems to be testing summer waters already. Yes, it's warm, but, too, the schedule is starting to break up routines that have been with us for most of the school year. Things are happening! Some family members are returning to work (post maternity/paternity leave), some are planning vacations, some are thinking of upcoming child birthday celebrations. All this in the next few weeks! We are zig zagging between pleasures and gatherings and hefty schedules, mindful of the pandemic (no, it's not over), giving in to the pull of the great outdoors.

Disrupted schedules start today: we're having a family Sunday dinner on Saturday and not at the farmhouse. Don't ask. Our scheduling details are not that important. I'm still cooking, partly here, partly at my daughter's house.

Hello, Sandpiper!

Sparrow, do you think you need a haircut? No I don't!

Daddy's teaching me poker! I love it!

(Dinner)

 

I pull up to the farmhouse just before sunset. Ed is out in the courtyard, gathering shovels and buckets. The trees have arrived! -- he tells me with not a small amount of excitement.

We'd been waiting for them for a while: they're replacements for the ones we planted in the New Forest last spring that didn't make it through the winter. (We'd put in 67 and we lost 14. Considering we'd planted six inch dried twigs with insignificant roots, I'd say we were lucky!) 

 

 

As dusk set in, we put down our tools and headed back inside. Well, almost inside. The tractor mower is out and the meadow trails are disappearing under the grasses and weeds, so I take a spin around the property reaffirming the paths that would be with us all summer long. It's pretty dark by the time I roll the machine back into the barn.

And at home, Ed and I slide into our usual couch time together. If I am here, this never changes. An evening of reading and show watching, over popcorn. And maybe a bar of chocolate. A glass of wine. This side by side time is solid. Keeping to such sweet habits keeps me sane, even when there is so much going on that it boggles the old mind! 

One foot in spring, the other in summer... Hey, need some summer reading? May I suggest Like a Swallow -- just a click at the sidebar will lead you to a preorder form (or, find it on Amazon. No, silly reader, you can't get it yet. June 3rd, okay?)

With love...

Hot New Title

Well, it's hot outside. The crab apple is in full bloom, the lilac is catching up. We've moved forward! In the wee morning, I look out from the porch onto this:

 

 

Within a few hours, the crab apple will have fully opened and the lilac will be just behind! For the next day or two, everything else will take a back seat to these two grand dames of the farmette landscape.  Sorry, tulips. I know you're beautiful. It's just that the blooms of a crab apple are so fleeting!

Oh, the beauty of this tree! Of the path to the barn, snuggling between a number of crabs and peaches, all in bloom now!

It's stunning looking back at the farmhouse too.

Okay, the tulips still deserve our happy gaze.

Yes, the landscape is transformed. The farmette has moved on.

And so have I: the Great Writing Project is officially behind me! I have a release date for you: June 3rd. My book -- a memoir on growing up in postwar Poland -- has the title Like a Swallow: Looking Back at a Polish Childhood. You can pre-order it at Little Creek Press (the side bar link will lead you to it) or you can wait until your big pal Amazon (and Amazon.co.uk for readers on the other side of the ocean) lists it in the next few days. 

This is what you call a soft release. I'm sure I'll write more about it as time goes on, but right now Ed and I are getting ready to plant trees and finish the tomatoes and redo the lavender bed. 

 

(Walking through the young orchard, in bloom...)

 

 

 

And don't forget about baking! Snowdrop asked for rhubarb muffins (with instructions: use the recipe for rhubarb cake only bake it as muffins! Okay, little one, Done.)

She is here after school, in this summer heat. Climbing the suddenly stunningly beautiful tree.

 

(Inside, she reads the next in a series of actually very simple books on some of the great classic painters, but they're really loved by her, because they rip to shreds conventional ways of looking at a painting. This one is about Van Gogh, but you'd never know it. It's more about what a young child might see in a painting by him.)

 

 

 

And the swallows dart in and out of the garage, repairing their nests from years past, laying their eggs, waiting for the new generation of little ones to be born.

Hottest Yet

We broke down and flipped on the AC and thanked our stars that this old farmhouse does indeed have central air. I mean, it's just plain hot, record breaking hot -- downstairs, upstairs, everywhere. (We're hitting a high of 93F, or 34C.) So we cooled ourselves off and pretended it's summer.

Even though the plant life outside belongs to spring.

Our lilac and crab apple are yet to bloom, but I can see the buds racing to the finish line. With this weather, I expect they'll both explode within the next day or two, which is a good thing as I am away next week (in Chicago) and I would have hated to miss the fragrance and the utter prettiness of these two spring beauties. 

For now, I watch their tight buds slowly relax their grip.

 

 

I took a few photos of the farmette from points I don't normally photograph. Everything is so beautiful right now that no matter where you stand, you're going to be enchanted. Unless you're one of those people who never smiles at a pretty meadow or a patch of unfurling ferns.

(old orchard, with some newer quince trees, in bloom)

(breakfast: there are about a million violets, growing everywhere; may as well bring some to the table...)

It's hot enough for me to take out the toddler pool for Snowdrop. No she is not a toddler. It's stupidly tiny for her. But splashing is something you can do even in the kitchen sink if that's all you have available to you you. Predictably, she seizes the moment (after school).

And as every year, I get her to pick some of our asparagus. She'll eat a few stalks right there, before handing the rest to me.

A blast of summer. Strange and a bit surreal, but after that never ending cold early spring, I don't hear anyone complaining. 

One more day of the heat wave. Then, of course, come the storms. And a gentler end to spring.

Still Hot

Last night, I think we got too stubborn. No, we will not run the AC in May. We will not! 90F (32C)? We can handle it! 

We handled it, but when I went upstairs to sleep, it was brutal. Keeping the windows open was not a good idea. The hot air came up from below, came in from outside, came in from every corner of the farmette lands. I'm sure we handily topped 95F in there! I came down, I rested on the floor, I went back up -- still hot. Cold water, cool sheets and the power of imagination: I fell asleep, stubbornly resisting the flip of the AC switch.

This morning, we kept the windows closed.

Despite the storm warnings, we had no rain yesterday, so the garden, if you can believe it, is looking a little summer weary. The daffodils and tulips are cycling through the stage of looking perky to looking spent. Well, that's okay. May is a month for the next stage spring blooms. I'm ready for the flowering fruit trees, for the violets in the lawn, yes, for the dandelions. It's all very pretty. A few photos from the farmette, in the heat of May:

Breakfast, with a bunch of garden daffodils. The doubles bloom later than the classic single yellows.

I tend to take photos closer to the farmhouse in early spring because that's where I plant most of the bulbs, but in fact, my daily walks and inspections focus very much on the fields beyond, like on this much loved Big Bed. Every plant here is known and coddled! 

I did not work (much) in the flower beds today. My car needed its annual checkup. Unfortunately, the car service center is on one of the uglier streets in town (it's alongside other car dealers -- one after the other -- alternating with many dental offices and very uninteresting strip malls). I had 90 minutes to spare and I went for a walk  and because my surroundings were so uninspiring, I brooded about my writing projects going forward. The one I'd just finished (to be trumpeted here quite soon!) was so brazen! I'm sure it will provoke comments, because when you write about life under so called communism, you are asking for it, from all sides! 

But the fact is, memoirs are always like that: people who read them often believe they would have made better decisions under similar circumstances. We are forever optimistic about our own ability to improve upon the lives of others. (Not so much our own.) So, here I am, releasing something that is almost the opposite of a typically tame Ocean page. And where do I go from there? Back to the safety of a less controversial topic, or do I continue on that other path -- the one I took in my Great Writing Project?

I don't have an answer yet. I'm thinking about it. Maybe by the next visit to the car service place on awful Odana Road, I'll have come up with a path forward. I've got six months! (My, they milk you for service appointments with new cars! No wonder I lived so long with old wrecks!)

In the evening, Ed and I packed a picnic of tacos from Tapatios Cocina Mexicana and we drove to Observatory Hill right around sunset (which today falls at 8:10p.m.). It was still in the 80sF, but the breeze was exquisite. The sunset part was left mostly to the imagination, as a cloud layer at the horizon covered the flaming disk that we had before us on the drive to the hill.  

(the hazy view from the hill)

But still, it was lovely. 

Selfie time!

As usual, we were not the only ones there to watch the day recede and the dusk set in. A couple stood by their car, with a pooch in their arms. And then a pair of bikers, who lived down the hill and had to be doing the climb for the exercise, because why else, took the trouble to pause and tell us we looked picture worthy. Then they pedaled off. And I thought -- if we're picture worthy, I should do a timed release photo. I placed the camera in the middle of the road knowing darn well no car was going to run it down.

A summer-like outing to commemorate our great fortune in life, at this time, in this place.

With love...

Hot

They said it would be hot. They were right. It's very hot. 90F (over 32C). And what leaves you scratching your head is the leap from a very cold and late spring (farmers were complaining) to a steamy hot week of temperatures that call for a switch from the furnace to your AC unit. We dont quite do that, but Ed and I go back and forth about opened windows once again. He doesn't like to open them when it's cold -- it wastes heat. He doesn't like to open them on hot days -- it heats up the inside of the farmhouse, especially the upstairs. He is correct on both counts and still, I push back. Bringing the sounds and smells of the farmette lands into the home is exquisite! (True, sometimes other things come in as well. Like this morning we found a snake on the living room carpet. Probably a gift from one of the cats. It seemed dead.)

Despite the heat, I work hard once again. I clear out weeds and snip off spent stalks that were supposed to fall in the winter but somehow they didn't. In other words -- I clean up. And I think about this place that is so much our joint project: Ed works on the upkeep of all the structures and infrastructure, and, too, does some veggie growing and tree maintenance. I do much of the rest. 

I would not last long here without him. He'd last a little longer without me, but not too long. He's said many times that he would not work in the fields in the way that I do. He feels this place to be for the two of us. Alone, he, too, would move out.

When Monet died, his garden was lost to weeds and it took a dedicated effort, supported by a foundation (American, actually) to restore the property. There is no foundation that will support this place! Once we're out of here, I'm fairly sure that the farmette lands will be sucked up by the development that now borders us to the north and west. Hey, but for now, we are here and my efforts continue and today it was grand to work on the fields some more, so that every plant has a chance to show off all that it can do in a healthy and uncrowded environment.

Today's photos from a morning outside:

(Ed and Unie, who is his one cheeper pal)

(Yep, our first asparagus)

(Checking on a paper wasp nest that we're trying to move from over the door to a different location)

And in the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop. I predicted she'd like to splash in some form of water and I am right. There is not a whole lot here that is splash worthy for a 7 year old, but in the early stages of summer, anything and everything seems great! Even the plain old hose. Before long, she is 100% wet and happy as a duck.

We'll have storms tonight. Or not. Typical summer like speculations. Except it's not summer! But oh, how fresh and beautiful it all is! It's tulip time right now, so I'll leave you with one shading from orange to pink to purple. Only in nature can you find something this exquisitely beautiful.

Monday

On a top ten list of things I love about retirement I would include this: working outside in good weather. If you are a person who absolutely must plant things in spring, you look forward to days like this one --sunny and warm, breezy and mild -- so that you can do a lion's share of your work in your garden or wherever it is that you're planting stuff. It's a real let down when such perfect weather comes on days you have to spend in an office, at your desk, on in front of a class bitten by spring fever. You just want to be out planting. But then comes retirement! You are not constrained by anything except your stiff joints and your own schedule -- one that presumably has some flexibility so that indeed, on perfect days you can be out there, not in here. Out in that breeze, that sunshine, out getting your hands dirty, out adding all that you feel must be added to your planting space.

It's a ridiculously warm day. A high of 81F (so 27C). And it's going to get even warmer. The flowers love it! Want to visit some with me?

(The west field now filled with daffodils.)

(The shade garden always looks best in spring, when it is hit by dappled sunlight through tree branches that are not yet fully canopied.)

(Happy seems.... happy!)

(We do a lot to encourage bees here, but daffodils don't typically attract many pollinators...)

Breakfast -- of course on the porch! Of course!

And then I put aside my camera and take out my shovel and I help Ed with the tomatoes, but mainly I plant the great bulk of the seeds: in the new orchard (where the plum and the cherry are blooming!)...

... and in the various spaces we have tried to clear in the new peach orchard east of the barn. 

And I weed. The whole roadside bed. Phew -- that one's a toughie!

A whole day of outdoor work.

It's work that makes you tired in the best of ways. And because I'm retired, I can take an afternoon pause on the porch and look out and feel the deep contentment that comes when everything begins to fall into place for you.