Snapshots from the Marquette
Music Festival

Some music festivals were just meant to be, like the one that you walk out your door to and land on without any more effort than closing your eyes and taking two steps.  The Marquette Music Festival has been going strong for over two decades and it brings in a very wide pool of talent and people.

From Gypsy dance music to migrant cowboy music and a six piece jazz orchestra that plays standards from the 40's and 50's I guess you could say that the whole point is variety and diversity.

People file down the Rutledge Bridge and around Riverside Drive or, for the folks who really know how to pick a seat, boat-in, anchor and bring out the paddle boards and tubes and listen from a shallow beach.  I was able to walk the kayak across the street and move in and out of the parked boats looking for a good place to float and listen to Boogat.

The next morning, before the music starts, the mad-town Marquette flotilla begins its slow paddle to Monona from the Tenney Locks on all sorts of seafaring craft.

As with most of our trips to Madison in the past several months, this one was fast and furious – usually a combination of construction check-up, heavy weed patrol, a brisk mow and the meeting of some pretty easy going neighbors.  This one just happened to include a little midwest Mardi Gras,

and an even briefer visit to Olbrich Gardens about two miles down Atwood on Monona.

A Year on Monona

"The wretched thing had become a daily frustration. Here we were with hot weather and the outdoor eating season just around the corner – the days we had dreamed about back in England and through the winter–and we had nowhere to put a bowl of olives, let alone a five-course lunch." from A Year in Provence






June 10


One of the most peculiar things about managing a fully functioning residential home in a historical neighborhood that sits across from a river in a large city, is that you must come to trust relative strangers with the overall well-being of a house they see every day, and that you see online.  "Are the weeds creeping up through every last crack in the landscaping? Are the birds pecking away at the caulking lining the windows of the front porch...and have they roosted inside our fireplace?  Ants, centipedes? Who is to know?  Maybe the presence of the intermittent entrance of the contractor into the home – for such short spurts of time, one comes to wonder if the refrigerated wine cellar has become their own private storing unit and that on a thursday afternoon perhaps it is conveniently time to enter and swap out a Beaujolais for Pinot Grigio?  The other possibility for the out of town owner is to trust nothing, no one, and let the house alarm to do most of the heavy lifting for the sake of the two

hundred mile distance between.  The house alarm, for all that have entered into its alluring logic of perceived security, feels something like buying a boat or a house pet for that matter.  The boat will be fascinating to own and commandeer across the gleaming surfaces of the chain of lakes, but it is, to an equal degree, a large piece of metal rusting on water that you now own and it will certainly carp and moan for much attention as the years go on; the house pet, a darling soft little bundle of fur and brown eyes, but please do not forget about the piles on the carpeting behind the office desk at four in the morning or the yip and every shadow that crosses the clear pane of the front door.  This is to say, interpreted, the alarm will hopefully alert you to the most malicious of intruders and deter them to continue to walk briskly past your house, but also know that the metal mail slot carved onto the front door, when it collapses and hits metal to metal, will indeed strike fear into that same bold alarm and display broken glass in living room.  When the call in landed from Des Moines Iowa that you cozy uninhabited home in another city has a broken living window, what would you like to do?  Should we dispatch the cops?  Well, sure, send in the troops.  It is three in the afternoon in broad daylight directly

at the after school hours and the neighbors are so thick on the passing sidewalks that you may wonder, temporarily, how the cold intruder could even find a slot to jump through and tackle the window, but send them anyway, we must be safe!  The great benefit of the alarm, though, comes to the homeowner in a variety of unadvertised ways, our very own favorite is that from here at this very spot in Unalaska, WI, we now know the precise ranges of time that our carpenters have the time in their day to attempt some of the tasks that we have requested, like please gut and recreate our master bathroom would be nice.  For overtime the carpenter has to enter our home, they too must go through the deliberate

process of sounding off our alarm then resetting it on departure, each of which signal is briskly sent to us via handy email.  Gone are the days of long-distance contracting when the owner implores more progress while the carpenters ensure that that is precisely what is happening, all the while sipping sparkling waters from the high perch of a pontoon boat just now on maiden voyage from Lake Mendota to Lake Monona.  For better or worse, we have the hours of entry and industry flashing by our eyes hundreds of miles away instantaneously.... and for the most part, we know that over haul of that trap that is now our bathroom or the remodeling of our entire basement more than likely takes more time than twenty minutes each tuesday.

A Year on Monona

"Every day, as the weather stayed mild, there was fresh evidence of growth and greenery, and one of the most verdant patches of all was the swimming pool, which had turned a bilious emerald in the sunshine.  It was time to call Bernard the pisciniste with his algae-fighting equipment before the plant life started crawling out of the deep end and through the front door." from A Year in Provence








There are certain things that are apparently as Provencial as they come.  The vast summer homes, stretched out in acres of dilapidated pinot grape vines, and the summer pool that once was are a few

that Mayle describes as he and his wife move through the unpredictable patterns of the rustic spring remodeling season.  A short glass of pastis up against a vividly bright day on the slope of a French foothill; or a good game of boules played in the town square somewhere in the small bricked villages of the Luberon.  I propose a good Pan Bagnat is another suitable French pairing for anywhere, anytime, but especially at a family friendly park music festival like the one upcoming this weekend in Madison at the Yahara Place Park.

It looks like the set-up for the festival – music on grassy stages and a flotilla of good humor – would be ripe for a leisurely picnic including the most French hand meal this side of the steak frites or a gruyure onion soup...the bagnat.

The shortened version of the recipe we tried last night starts with a good selection of rustic round bread, sliced or pulled apart to the liking of the picnic-goer.  Because this is a version of the famous Nicoise salad, tuna is called for, mixed in this case with a vinaigrette and I happen to slip on some mayonnaise on each slice along with a pad of mustard.  Some half moon slices of cucumber for crisp and the green, a bit of spinach and some freshly cooked hard-boiled egg and you are practically lazing

beachside somewhere on Nice, France, or Monona, Madison, listening to the jazz of the horned-up  Fat Babies out of Chicago.

A Year on Monona

"The Luberon sounded different in spring. Birds who had been ducking all winter came out of hiding now that the hunters were gone, and their song replaced gunfire.  The only jarring noise I could hear as I walked along the path toward the Massot residence was a furious hammering, and I wondered if he had decided to put up a For Sale notice in preparation for the beginning of the tourist season." A Year in Provence







For us, these are the last days of Quarry Lane – a bright and beautiful shell of a home quickly losing all of the stuff that makes a home a home.  Waiting for us is a new library, a river, and a set of new neighbors that are fast becoming as interesting as those encountered in Mayle's travelogue of the Luberon in southern France.

We are very thankful that the river waters right outside our new condo are calm and kayakable, lined by a usable beach and the sky busy with cranes and bald eagles.  The Black River is great water for local kayakers who don't want to have to pull themselves quite so intensely against the wind as out on the main channel.

The Moorings bay turns and outlets into a wide pocket of the Black, skirting along the shoreline to the east. Although a bit loud by the highway along this stretch, it is as picturesque as images of a Louisianna bayou. Wide, upturned trunks and windy brush, sometimes exposed and sometimes deep enough to paddle over, the backwaters are an ever changing maze of biology.  

A Year on Monona

"Life had changed, and the masons had changed it.  If we got up at 6:30 we could have breakfast in peace.  any later, and the sound effects from the kitchen made conversation impossible. One morning when the drills and hammers were in full swing, I could see my wife's lips move, but no words were reaching me. Eventually she passed me a note: Drink your coffee before it gets dirty." – Peter Mayle, from A Year in Provence










To write a family blog that would take its inspiration from an English couple who finally decided to take the great leap from London to Provence, first there must be someplace to land the blog, a home, in this case on Monona, to even begin.  Unlike the weather beaten couple from Peter Mayle's book, this time around anyway, we have been mostly able to avoid the sawdust in the coffee, and yet the sawdust is still there as the main bathroom in our new home in Madison is being completely gutted and new basement constructed....with us yet having moved in.  We picture great diligence on the part

of this Madison crew, tearing and hammering away as we think to ourselves back here in Onalaska that great strides are being made, just like the great and efficient strides made here back at home at our new condominium on the back bay of the Black River.  Unlike Mayle's classic, this blog entry can't be, by its very nature, a well-conceived story, but more of an attempt at offering impressions of a family that has chosen to make a leap into the contours of a dream of the somewhat unknown.  It is less about a moving away from anything and more about a moving toward a five-pointed opportunity, one for each person and one as a whole family.

New experiences, such as this one, as Carly is kindly welcomed to her fifth grade class for an orientation day at Edgewood school, will naturally blend with images of old.

Rock Dam pine needle gathering

Where we hope to also blend the great humor that is ought to be had by trying new skills against the

experience of those mastered.

If we are lucky along the way, the other, older participants of the Hess family – now both firmly planted in the great unknowable years otherwise known as teenhood – might stand still enough in front of dad's camera in order to capture and verify their existence, as Abby finds her new world on the campus of UW Madison, and Julia her studies under the open sky lights at Riverside Drive.  The reader can be sure the writer of the blog will most often be found looking out onto the sun-bedecked back courtyard pondering either the next meal or the next way to entertain fifth graders on the

volleyball court.  The mother will not be far away, lifting up, as is her way, the rest of us through her sheer might of good will, decency and care.