small things

Buddy and I took an afternoon constitutional about the yard and woods. It really feels like the end of summer and beginning of fall. The woods are *finally* tolerable again after a summer of mosquito-infestation. And, lo and behold, our much-coveted mums are just beginning to bloom.

Keepers of the Lawn

We just had a lovely interaction with our neighbor, Betty, who came over to accept our offer of some rhubarb. She is probably nearing 80, and has lived in her house since she was eight years old. She is very friendly, and loves to chat, and spends most of her time indoors caring for her husband, Herbert.

We asked Betty if she had ever seen the flowers (pictured above) that are popping up all over. Her response was no. She had never seen these flowers, but then again, Glen (previous owner) had never let the grass get so long that anything would bloom! She didn't mean it unkindly, but I am sure that we are far less diligent keepers-of-the-lawn than our predecessors.

here are a few more pictures taken moments ago:

generosity

I have recently been the recipient of an amazing gift. Gaby, whose work and photography projects can be glimpsed here, had an older digital camera sitting in her closet. As Gaby is an amazing artist/photographer, her equipment is quality, and even her older camera is pretty fabulous. Perhaps in response to my earlier complaints about trying to document our rural lives with a point and shoot (found here), my dear friend oh-so-kindly sent me her old camera.

It has been a funny thing to be the recipient of such a nice gift. I feel as though I am deeply indebted, and I am worried that I might not live up to my ability to "make photographs", as G would say. So, we are embarking on a photography course. As luck would have it, the entire content of a digital photography class Gaby taught at Berkeley is online. I have only gotten so far as reading the syllabus and reading about the first practices, and the textbook she used in that class is on its ways from another UW library. So, very soon, my dear friends, you will be subject to an onslaught of photos. However, for the time being, there is a smattering of new stuff on my flikr page, and I will show a few of my favorite new pics so far.

rhubarb!

We have at least three patches of rhurbarb on our property. They were all surprise finds and are all growing in very different places. One is in the garden plot proper (the same plot where Glen and Donna had their garden), one is in the woods near an old compost pile, and the third is at the edge of our yard where there is a mound of grasses and other wildness. I have been pillaging these stashes at different times (sorry Dan!) and have made two different rhubarb crisps.

This is the first stage of my strawberry rhubarb crisp made yesterday.

the other side

Classes are now over -- hooray! I survived my first year of teaching! Finals and graduation are this week, and by the 27th (when my mom and dad arrive) I will be done for the summer. I am looking forward to spending even more time outside with all of the stuff that is growing. There is something to be said for the ability of a long, hard, snowy winter to make you appreciate every moment of the spring and summer.

I have been rather delinquent in posting much about the domestic projects. There is a brand-new master bedroom (pictures to come) and - TA DA - a garden. The latter has been taking up much of our time these days. Rhonda is wonderfully maniacal about the whole thing, and can usually be found reading Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening , tending her many seedlings, or devising ways to build things we need from stuff we have. We have a group of co-gardeners who are lending expertise, muscle and enthusiasm. It has been fun and exhausting. We have dirt under our fingernails, the start of some serious farmer's tans, and the tendency to fall asleep before nine pm.

Here are some of the pics of what we have been making/crafting/ growing of late (more can be found through the link to my flikr page).



Rhonda made a compost bin out of wooden pallettes and chicken wire (all salvaged).














Our garden is 25 feet wide and 50 feet in length. We built a fence around the perimeter (to keep out deer and rabbits) and made it out of buckthorn and maple. The buckthorn is an invasive species that we want to get out of our woods, and the maples were already fallen due to erosion (facilitated by the buckthorn). Dan was our master fence builder, having toiled many a summer day on his family farm in New Hampshire.



We are gardening in a series of 4x4 boxes. There are complex mathematical calculations that determine how many of each kind of plant can live in a square foot, and in the sixteen square feet of the box. Rhonda is in charge of the analysis. I dig holes and make the frames for the boxes (grunt).

These are our first sets of lettuce and arrugula (which we grew from seed).


The lemon cucumber are also from seed. They are going to go in the ground soon. (but not today -- there is a frost warning tonight!) We will also be planting a set of heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers recently obtained through the UWGB plant sale, along with a whole batch of starts that Jane has at home.

thick plots and things that grow

The garden is tilled, the lettuce is sitting in the cold frame having its day in the sun. (Putting plants out for the day and bringing them in at night reminds me a bit of Dr. Spock's c. 1950 advisement that mothers put their infant outside in the pram for a good hour of sun and airing every day!)

The sun is out, and, the semester is nearing its end.

It is hard to believe that we have been here a full nine months. Perhaps because of the connection to birth that nine months seems significant. We have now experienced all four seasons, and all but two months. The sweetest of months, in my book, are yet to come.

I am eagerly anticipating summer. Thrilled to actually have one. A real one. Sure, I will be doing things like planning a Women's Studies course (exciting!), and revising my chapter that is appearing in a forthcoming book, but most of the summer will be spent working in the garden, spending more time with friends, and reading for fun. We are not planning on going anywhere -- sorry mom and grandma. Instead we are going to stay on our little seven acre plot and watch things grow. I am heartily looking forward to the laziness of hot days, the boredom of midsummer, and that delicious feeling -- usually experienced in early August -- of the anticipation of starting the cycle all over again.

the season

it now stays light until almost 8pm. Today was 66 degrees, and things are growing. We are still a bit behind most of the lower-48 in blooms and such, but what we do have is much appreciated and - in our case - significantly documented. All photos were taken within the last hour.


Lemon Cucumber Seedlings



Lilac Buds



Buds on Unknown Tree (Do you know?)

a ski before breakfast

The snow is still here. Lots of it. Despite many well-wished from friends (Jennifer, thanks for the encouragements of spring & the book!) we are still surrounded by at least one and a half feet of snow all around.

This is definitely the longest winter I have ever experienced. However, there is an upside: because of the daytime melting and nighttime re-freezing, the snow is really hard and quite good for cross country skiing. I bought skis in February (thanks to mom and grandma's b.day contributions) and I have been skiing quite a bit. The best part is that I can ski right out of our back door and off into the woods. The struggle is creating a trail, but when the snow is packed hard as it is now, I can ski anywhere with no problem. I went skiing yesterday afternoon, and it was hilarious. I took Buddy along for the romp, but had to hold on to him until we got into the woods. He would pull me for a while until one of the skis would poke him in the butt and then he would shoot ahead, pulling me off balance. We took several tumbles which meant me landing in a heap on the ground followed by Buddy running over to me and climbing onto my crumpled body so as to appropriately lick my face in consolation.

This morning I went for a wake-up ski. Alone. It was beautiful in the woods at 7:15. All I could hear were the birds and the shh-shh-ing of my skis over the icy terrain.

Spirit World

I had insomnia last night. I woke up from a sound sleep at 3:46 and could not get back to sleep. So I decided to get up for a while. I noticed from the bathroom window that it had snowed during the night, and I wanted a better look. I headed to the front door and turned on our outside light, a perspective from which I could see the it was still snowing; everything looked soft around the edges in the outside world.

I was standing in my bathrobe, staring in a half-daze, when I saw a large creature walk lithely down our driveway and take a turn onto the sidewalk. By the time she had begun her trot up the walkway I could tell it was a cat: a large, gray, well-fed cat. She walked right up our front steps and stopped to cast a look directly at me. We stared at each other for a while until she leaped off of the stairs and into the bushes.

I tracked the cat's path and headed towards our back door just in time to see her run through the yard towards one of our big pines. I quickly pulled on my blue, polka-dotted rain boots and went outside in order to find her. i was thinking that no cat should be outside in the snow.

I stood in the yard for a while in my bathrobe and blue rubber boots while snow gently fell on my shoulders. I quietly called pss-pss-pss and nch-nch-nch to try to call her out from her hiding place. The world held the quiet of a snowstorm at 4am; there was no sign of my gray, feline friend. It suddenly occurred to me that I may have entirely imagined this creature into existence, or that she was an other-worldy cat called to send me a message.

The feeling was haunting and beautiful.

I decided to go inside and read Banana Yoshimoto until I could fall back to sleep.

0º

Z-E-R-O.

This was the temperature when I went to school this morning at 7:30am.

I drove instead of walking.

Does this make me a bad person? (It is only 1/2 mile.)

More snow predicted for tonight.

They are saying this is abnormally cold even for Northern Wisconsin.

10 minutes ago...

...& 20 minutes ago...

snow

it started snowing about an hour ago -- first snow of the year. We went outside with the dog and looked up into the sky to watch the tiny flakes descend.
it was beautiful.

I am sitting at my desk watching a ladybug. My home office is "temporarily" -- meaning at least for the next six months-- located on the front sun-porch. This is an east-facing room, long and narrow with some wicker chairs that were left behind by the previous owners. Much to everyone's surprise the room is well heated; in fact, it is the warmest room in the house. Even warmer now than before thanks to the additional insulation added by Rhonda and family as they rennovated the master bedroom above. So, I am sitting her watching a ladybug attempt to regain full mobility after being partly squashed by my left hand just a few moments ago. The squash was accidental though inevitable. Apparently every home in Northern Wisconsin is annually invaded by thousands of ladybugs.

They are said to bring good luck. They eat aphids. But they also end up in everything: doing a backstroke in my tea, landing on food, dying in the windowsill, drowning in the toilet, dancing around light bulbs. The other night Buddy was alone in the bedroom while we sat just feet away in the tv area. He was growling and then barking at something we couldn't hear. I went in to investigate and found him sitting with his face inches from the lamp, barking at the silly ladybugs who were vigorously flying back and forth between the light bulb and the shade.

streaming

It has been a few days. Instead of trying to write some boring narrative of exactly what we have been doing, I am going to remain true to my ADD tendencies and share a range of moments/ thoughts and projects.

Item #1: We have just about completed the kitchen (and when I say "we" I mean that I taped and cleaned and Rhonda painted. She had better motor control). It was such a catharsis to strip the wallpaper and transform the room with paint. So much a thrill that I got ahead of myself and started to strip the bathroom wallpaper while in the shower. Yes, I was in the shower when suddenly possessed by a need to strip the wallpaper. Here is what the wallpaper looked like. You see, it had to go. Now we have a half-naked bathroom, stripped down the the paper backing and paint. Still, an improvement.

More important, here is what all of the fixtures including lighting, faucets, towel bars, etc. look like:

Can you name this style? I think the switchplate is actually designed to look like a scroll. Is it medieval? Colonial? ('cause, you know, colonists were really big into decorative switchplates.)

Item #2: We had to take the car to the garage to get this annoying rattle taken care of. The guys were super-nice and charges us only 10 bucks for tightening the heat shield. They did, however, also encounter a large mouse nest in the car -- when the mechanic opened the hood one of "the tenants" scurried away. (I can't help but think about how devastated that mouse-family is by this event. One of them now lives at Jim's All-Care while the others could be scattered at various points between here and there.)

I had to ride my bike back from the mechanic (as we have only one car and want to have only one car). I was struck by how beautiful the ride was. It is only 2.5 miles from our house to the strip mall area where the mechanic is located. Surrounded by fast food joints, a mall, and the ubiquitous Walmart, it was a huge surprise to realize that the swatch of land between stripmall-land and our house is untouched. For now. There are rumors of a Super-Walmart and a Target coming soon.

Item #3:

We went to Green Bay yesterday. This is, perhaps, the thing that makes me feel most like I'm living in the hinterlands. Most people we know drive to Green Bay (56 miles) once or twice a month to do a "big shop." The grocery stores here are notoriously expensive and there is a Woodmans in Green Bay. Woodmans is cool and huge and really cheap. And it is employee owned. It also has the largest cheese section I have ever seen in any store anywhere.

This picture shows Rhonda leaning over one (of four) of the cheese cases. They have everything from Kraft cheese in a box to local organic cheeses. Since we are on a pretty tight budget, we are not buying organics these days. However, we are trying to support local farmers and buying only Wisconsin cheeses.

I was also struck by the fact that you can buy lots of things in very large quantities. Just to give a sense of perspective, these mayo containers were as big as my head. Also, note the large cannister of MSG at the bottom right.

My final observation is more about regional brands. It goes without saying that, when you move from one part of this country to another, you will encounter new, regional brands. There are all kinds of things we have never seen before. However, this has to be one of the strangest. Faygo, a mid-western soda company, has a line of beverages called "Ohana." As indicated on the packaging, "Ohana is Hawaiian for family."

Ohana = family = brand of soda in the midwest.