Up Late : #WeekendCoffeeShare

2019-02-032023-04-30 E.W. Bennefeld2 Comments

Weekend Coffee Share is a time for us to take a break out of our lives and enjoy some time catching up with friends (old and new)!

Grab a cup of coffee and share with us! What’s been going on in your life? What are your weekend plans? Is there a topic you’ve just been ruminating on that you want to talk about?

All are welcome! Just add your link to the Linky-List, and be sure to visit others and join in their conversations!

— Eclectic Alli

Welcome! Please help yourself to your choice of (virtual) beverage and snacks. At this time of the morning, everyone else is still asleep in our household. I am trying to avoid making any sounds. The Scampers have been quite demanding, being inside and without any meaningful exercise for too long.

If we were having coffee together, this morning, I would tell you that I have welcomed the respite from the long stretch of sub-zero Arctic air that should have stayed at the North Pole where it belongs. When I took the Scampers outside, first thing on Friday, the temperature was high enough that I was able to go out in shirtsleeves to snap a few photographs. Our next Winter Storm Advisory indicates a return to inclement weather less than ten hours from now. I am not amused.

withered fruit on the cotoneaster tree — Cotoneaster Fruit

One of my planned activities for the weekend and the rest of the month is to write a haiku (or related poetry form) for each day in February. I am not confining myself to the prompts provided at NaHaiWriMo (February is haiku-writing month), but of the haiku that I’ve written so far this month, one of yesterday’s poems included the prompt. So as to not clutter my poetry blog, I am collecting the February haiku at my Blogger blog for the time being: theartofdisorder.blogspot.com (I also have November’s poem-a-day poems there; I didn’t manage a poem a day, but I didn’t miss a lot of days.) Here is Friday’s poem:

winter’s fingers draw pictures on the windows
while I sleep beneath my quilts

There is also a photo to go with it. My other activity for this weekend is to go through my sorting boxes, looking for music CDs that my husband wants to add to the computer that he takes out to the workshop. I had not been keeping track of them, not having a CD player for too many years. I have been feeling out of sorts for weeks, now, and I’m hoping that napping and remembering to eat more often will help.

If we were having coffee together, this morning, I would mention that another of my cousins has died. I hadn’t seen him often for many years, now; not since his father’s funeral in 2013, I believe. I had 60-some first cousins, my dad being the oldest of twelve children, and I did not know many of them. Most did not live in the area, and I had left home at age seventeen, missing most of the family reunions for that side of the family. I think they had a lot of reunions on the West Coast.

I can hear the Scampers waking up in the next room, and so I must bring our conversation to a close. Looking forward to visiting your Weekend Coffee Share post before the weekend’s conclusion.

Best wishes for your week!

Hugs & much love,
Lizl

Break Time · Life Through My Windows · Tea

Midmorning Tea

2018-09-052021-09-06 E.W. BennefeldLeave a comment

The Morning Garden

I started out the day with a cup of Toddy coffee (12g carbs) and 10 grams of very dark chocolate (3g carbs) while the Scampers were in their kennels, eating breakfast. The ground was still wet where the sunlight hadn’t reached, which was almost all of the back yard. Very cold feet, as my moccasins got soaked. Lovely day, though, with a brisk wind and few clouds. Unlike Tuesday, there were flowers in the backyard garden, in spite of there being a frost warning. (I believe the warning was issued for tonight, also, but only for the upper river valley for both nights. I should check the weather history; I am positive that I saw my breath in the air, yesterday morning, when no flowers appeared at all in that plot.)

Time has drifted by, and while I have now tea beside my chair, this is no longer mid-morning. The Scampers have gotten me out to the back yard any number of times, so far, to check on noises around the neighborhood. And I’ve eaten the last of the rotisserie chicken that we picked up during yesterday morning’s outing.

Yesterday afternoon, the other of us visited the ophthalmologist, who got rid of the cloudiness of the left eye after the cataract surgery, last year. By the end of the evening, he was quite happy with the results. We celebrated by going out for supper to Denny’s restaurant to eat. My blood sugar was okay, this morning, but the allergies are not, and the pollen index is 10.3 (?) on a scale of 1 to 12. I should not have spent so much time taking photographs in the gardens. Drinking tea and doing my breathing exercises.

Mention was made of waking up at night to write. The urgency of the moment. I wrote a lot of poems that way during the 30-day NaPoWriMo event that accompanies National Poetry Month. Once again, I wrote a poem for each day, although not always in response to one of the prompts provided. The poem below relates vaguely to one of the prompts for Day 21. I was looking through my early poems from this year, enjoying memories of writing together with a group of folks (email exchanges, conversations).

I sometimes wonder if I write so much simply because there are so few people in my world to talk with. Or, if I simply have nothing to say to anyone else; i.e., not able to carry on a conversation. I suppose I would worry people, should I start talking to myself instead of putting my thoughts into paper journals and computer files.

The other of us has begun his work day, continuing to paint the house. I am moving on to wash the dishes. Thanks for being here!

Best wishes for the day,
Lizl

Bring Your Own Plot

Print has gotten smaller
in books as years go by
and letters crowd the line
with two or more ascenders
where only one should be, and
below the quivering baseline
the descenders stub their toes

I do not know what choice to make
to maximize these story times—
read very fast for fleeting joy…
or memorize my favorite lines
to savor when the light fades
and shadows darken all

We will call up treasured stories,
the characters and I, and we
will plot out better endings
in which none of us will die

Break Time · Family · Personal · Poetry · Social Link-Ups · Writing

Weekend Coffee Share| 23 April 2016

2016-04-232023-04-30 E.W. Bennefeld1 Comment

Remembering one of a group of poems that I wrote to a Poetry 101 Rehab writing prompt: “No Forevers“. It’s on my poetry-writing blog: Quilted Poetry.

If we were having coffee together, this weekend, I would share that I feel haunted, sometimes, by poetry that I’ve read/written throughout my life. More often, now, as my parents are nonagenarians (Father, soon a centenarian, it appears). The burden of life is not the present, which we cope with routinely or not as we’re used to doing, nor is it the future, which weighs lightly on us. The burden of life fast becomes the burden of the past, of life…lived irretrievably.

[I was looking forward from “No Forevers”, but should have looked back to “Ending All“.]

If we were visiting in person, this weekend, I would admit to liking where I am and who I have become, but Good grief! the paths that brought me to this place and time and self. Myself only in my 70th year, I scarcely consider myself to be “old”. As the shortness of breath and the fatigue slip away, again, as I recover from the latest inflammation of the lungs, (I once gain am not taking the Albuterol, nor any other pills or medications, unless I might get a headache [unlikely] or a muscle cramp from over exercise [soon to be possible].) I forget about limitations.

I bought a new gadget from Microsoft that I am enjoying. I bought a stick computer made by Lenovo with no third-party software added. I may not be able to read Nook books on it until I straighten out where apps are loaded, as opposed to where I want them, but I can avoid storing backup files on Cloud by attaching a 1-T external HD to the powered USB hub. My plan is to use this computer, which uses the TV as a monitor/speaker system, for my personal writing. Which involves figuring adding the same User to all of my blogs, so that I do not have to battle with signing out/signing in.

I have loved computers since college and landed my first job, a position as a computer programmer within a month of graduating with a B.A. (in, oddly, English and philosophy). I shan’t talk about my preschool adventures taking apart my father’s prized console radio or my first career ambition, which was to be a pilot of a fighter plane. My parents did supply me with chemistry set and a real, working microscope while I was in grade school. In middle school I earned/saved enough to buy a reflector telescope. I didn’t abandon my telescope until marriage (in the 90s), since my husband has a scope with tracking and photo capabilities.

I don’t know if I will come back and complete this or not. The dogs have gone inside, and I assume that Al has returned home from great adventures. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Personal · Poetry · Writing

From the 1970s

2016-01-212016-01-21 E.W. Bennefeld2 Comments

Going through my files, looking for those that missed the purge schedule for clients’ work, I came across one of my poetry chapbooks; it holds some of my poems from the mid-1970s to late 1980s. Somewhere I have a binder with the original typed/written poems; those sheets have dates on them. This one would, I think, have made a good prose poem, but I think the line breaks add something to it. I wrote this one in the mid-70s. Nearly 40 years ago.

Continue reading “From the 1970s” →

Break Time · Writing

Morning Coffee | Old Poems: Haiku, 1960s

2015-11-082015-11-08 E.W. BennefeldLeave a comment

I guess I took too many or overly long naps on Saturday, because when I awakened at 2:30 this morning, I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I finished another Darkover novel: Thendara House.

We are nearly out of Toddy coffee concentrate, and so I’ve put another pound of Folgers medium roast into cold water to steep. I must remember to decant it, this evening. It’s too early to put on a pot of coffee, so I might switch to tea. And fix breakfast.

In the sixties, Haiku were just coming into awareness at the college where I completed my undergraduate degree. After spending my first two years in mathematics, computer programming and chemistry, I transferred into Humanities to pursue a major in English. I had thought to minor in mathematics by completing Differential Equations, but I got sidetracked by other interests and never got back to it.

There were four haiku in the poetry collection returned to me by my sister’s son and his wife in addition to the one on the title page.

Continue reading “Morning Coffee | Old Poems: Haiku, 1960s” →

Personal · Poetry

Light My Path | Poem, early 1970s

2015-11-072016-01-28 E.W. BennefeldLeave a comment

The paper–ink combination in the the collection of my poetry that my sister had was not good. I have thought that I would post the ones that I do not have elsewhere to this blog, just so I know where they are, and then, when I get a number of them put together, I will make pages of them. (I have also posted this more recently, in January 2016.)

Continue reading “Light My Path | Poem, early 1970s” →

Personal · Poetry

The end of the day

2015-11-062015-11-06 E.W. BennefeldLeave a comment

I am winding down from the day, enjoying a cup of tea, rather than coffee. Al is in the other room, listening to late-night television programming. Perry Mason, Night Gallery, &c.

The day didn’t go as expected. As we were getting ready to out for a quick supper (eggs and hash browns), I recalled that Al had talked, earlier in the week, about going to the visitation/prayer service for the wife of one of his former co-workers. That was about 5:10, just 10 minutes into the visitation, and so he left for the funeral home. The co-worker, Al said, was shocked to see him there, and they spent much time talking together. Later in the evening, we did go out to Denny’s and had a good time talking over events of the day.

I located and washed the last of the yogurt jars (the dog had picked up that last missing jar and carried it under the kitchen table, to lick it clean in privacy), which are now sitting on the sideboard air drying. And all of the lids. I also washed, dried and put away the pan in which I cooked rice, earlier. For lunch, I fixed white rice, sardines and steamed vegetables.

When my youngest sister died in September 2014, her son and his wife stopped by here with an old poetry book of mine that my sister had kept by her. The poems were written in the 1960s and 1970s. I’d moved back here during the winter of 1979/1980, I think; the address on the title page was the old one. The poetry book contains the only copy there is of some of these poems. An interesting time in my life. Major events, experiences and transitions.

Some tattered papers
drifting through deserted streets
on a hollow wind . . .

From the title page of my first poetry collection and written during the summer before my junior or senior year of college