Midmorning Tea

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

Rewriting the World

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

Copyright © 2018-05-02, by Elizabeth Bennefeld. Written for the 2018 NaPoWriMo event and posted on my The Written Word blog.

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From the 1970s

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.

Morning Coffee | Old Poems: Haiku, 1960s

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.

Light My Path | Poem, early 1970s

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.)

The end of the day

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