Thursday – Before Friday’s Rain

White Campion Flowers

After Breakfast

A Quiet Space

Blowing Away

I don’t know how we have reached the end of this month already! Today, we went shopping for meat, fish, and salad greens. Then Al started work again on the workshop, calling upon me sporadically to lift, steady and hold siding while he measured the boards for cutting and then trimmed and nailed them in place.

Yesterday, I got a couple loads of laundry washed. Still trying to make inroads into the dish-washing. The dogs are asleep on the sofa, right now, and looking so very peaceful. Charlie did find something inviting to roll around in, in the back yard, but I never did figure out what it was.

Just Rolling Around

What’s He Up To?

My current bed (recliner) is on its last breath of life, and I am still waffling on how I want to replace it. Al’s fell apart, last weekend, and so at the beginning of the week, we went shopping and found one that he likes. We’d thought to get mine at the same time, but I’m not feeling decisive, this week.

I did sign up for the 20-day Writing: Finding Everyday Inspiration course at WordPress. That’s at TheWrittenWord.net. Also, I have made private the posts at TheArtOfDisorder.net before the summer, mostly. I am hopeful that I will begin using that domain (another WP blog) for challenges and such. A lot of that blog revolved around trying to cope, and then getting organized, and then tracking my health, and such. I decided to put a lot of that aside for the time being, as far as topics go.

The pollen season is back in full force. Spring = tree pollen, Fall = ragweed (and nettles and sagebrush). I long for the first snowfall!

Snowfall

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Sunday’s Flower Art, 27 August 2017

At the middle of the afternoon, the sunlight and shade were such that I could manipulate the colors within some of the blue wild flax flowers.

Blue Wild Flax Flower, 2017-08-27, Elizabeth W. Bennefeld.

Blue Wild Flax Flower, 2017-08-27, by Elizabeth Wicker Bennefeld.

Blue Wild Flax Flower, 2017-08-27, by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld.

Blue Wild Flax Flower, 2017-08-27, Elizabeth W. Bennefeld.

The night felt too short, in spite of my getting right to sleep and staying asleep until eight o’clock or so. Before lunch, I lay down for a nap and slept for a few more hours. Nice lunch of cottage cheese, chicken breast with some garlic and herbs, baked with olive oil, steamed broccoli, and at midafternoon, I ate an apple. No idea what that will have done to my blood sugar levels by suppertime.

Al is applying wood filler to the siding and then sanding it. He seems quite happy with the progress. (See progress, two photos, through the twenty-fourth here.)

Morning visit to the garden

Hoverfly with blue wild flax: The bright light of the morning sun did not lend itself to photographing the hoverfly, but it’s always fun to see them work their way through the wildflowers at the beginning of our day.

The California Poppies are scarcer, now, since the plants have started dying off with the changing season and cooler night temperatures. Plains coreopsis, wild flax, and poppies are pretty much what’s there, along with a couple stalwart wild sunflowers.

And these are a few of the photos I took of blue wild flax flowers, today.

We haven’t had the massive smoke in the air from wildfires to the north, which changes the way the sunlight interacts with the flax colors. Also, I suspect that the soil is different enough in this new garden bed that it will take a few years of building it up. Probably has something to do with the colors. I found that with the wild violets, white in the garden and blue throughout the lawn.

I am going to look through posts from previous years to find a couple of good flower art pieces, next time I get near the computer.

WeekendCoffeeShare, 2017-08-20

I thought to bring my #WeekendCoffeeShare post over here, this week, where I usually include photographs from my wildflower garden. If you and I were getting together for coffee, this weekend, I might be a bit distracted. My city is in the top five “Worst Cities” for pollen counts, this weekend, and I very much wish that I were taking a nap, right now.

The week has been long and filled with many conflicting emotions as the process of grieving the loss of my parents continues. Writing out my feelings has been helpful. And looking at the many photos of the two of them and our family is contributing to relaxation and celebration of our time together. I realize again how involved in each other our parents were from the time they planned to marry, throughout the war, and on through the many decades that produced nine children and a plenitude of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, until our parents’ deaths, less than four months apart.

Our family was involved in gardening in order to eat, and also to enjoy flowers from tulips to lilacs (which we children dug up as shoots in pastures and transplanted to the borders of our two-lot yard. I still have tulip bulbs (which I must dig up and replant, this fall) from the order my mother got from the Netherlands, twenty years ago. (See “Tulips at Springtime“.)  We rented a garden space for many years from the veterinarian/farmer down the hill from our house. I remember helping to gather eggs and candle them before they went to market.

So many things come to mind, and I wonder. I wonder if my father would have come awake briefly from his nap, the evening of his death, and said to himself, “Yes, it’s been good, but 100 years is long enough”, and decided just to go back to sleep. I would live…I would want to live with such contentment and quiet accomplishment that I also would be pleased to let go when the time arrives. It will be interesting to find out what the next decade or two or three bring.

Thank you for dropping by! I expect that I will be back at Stray Coffee Breaks for next weekend’s coffee share. I will be taking a nap, I think, before anything else happens.

Best wishes for your week!

Elizabeth

Diana, our host, has put a Linkz button on her WeekendCoffeeShare post where you will find links to the blog posts of other participants. Please visit!

 

Sunday afternoon

Some recreational photos from the past week or so.

A bit under the weather, again today, and sleepy. The blue wild flax petals fall around Noon or before. Just one new one when I went out, half an hour ago. Going to reheat last night’s supper for lunch, I think, and then take a nap or read a book.