Category Archives: Communication

Favorite Photos : Friends Forever

31 Thursday May 2018

Posted by in Blessings, Creating order, Families, Life Through My Windows, Lifestyle, photography

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two cocker spaniel puppies on their quilt in front of the piano

The Scampers, Afternoon at Home

Daily Post Photo Challenges: All-time Favorites

The Scampers, our two Cocker Spaniels, are my favorite photo subjects. They were born just before the Christmas of 2015. So much mischief…so much fun! I don’t know how I would get along without them.

Just so, the various Daily Post prompts, challenges, and forums. We are faced with the possibility of becoming individuals in competition, vying for attention, instead of a community centered on sharing and admiring “the other”. Sort of.

May we continue to cherish one another

resting together
not too close, not far away
sharing our quilts

Copyright © 2018-05-31, by Lizl Bennefeld.

Post-Kickball
Friends Forever
The Scampers (Not in the Garden), 2018-05-25
Bored with it All
Watching You Watching Me
Waiting It Out
Discussions

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: A Place in the World Where We Belong

09 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in Blessings, Creating order, Families, Life Through My Windows, Nature, Personal, photography

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Thaddeus in the camp chair

Watching You Watching Me

A Place in the World: Weekly Photo Challenge.

Coming Home

 
Some Storms, but Good Neighbors

Out for a Walk
Child on Bicycle II
A Break from Shoveling
Taking a Walk
Snowfall Overnight
Mouse Dreams

 
Gardens and What’s in ’em

Wildflowers by the Lake
Blue Flax Flowers – False Colors
Tomatoes and Cucumbers, from the backyard neighbors
Painted Lady in the Back Yard

Keeping Tally

09 Saturday Sep 2017

Posted by in Families, Personal, Reflections

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Within the past ten months or so, the ranks of relatives have thinned dramatically.

  1. October 26, Aunt Dorothy, Mother’s sister (98 yrs)
  2. November 15, Mother (94 yrs)
  3. February 26, Dad (100 yrs)
  4. May 17, Uncle Wayne, Dad’s brother (77 yrs)
  5. July 20, Uncle Jim, Mother’s brother-in-law (93 yrs)
  6. July 31, Uncle Albert, Dad’s brother (95 yrs)
  7. September 5, Aunt Marion, Dad’s sister (88 yrs)

I believe that I will set aside some time for quiet.

Waiting: morning stretches out

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Families, Lifestyle, Personal

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Cocker Spaniel (Thadd, one of the Scampers), lying on the sitting-room rocking chair, waiting

Waiting in her chair

morning stretches out
footsteps back and forth … away
when is it my turn?

sometimes it’s hard, being good,
waiting for ‘That’s my good Thadd!’

 

Photo and verse, Copyright © 2017-09-06, by Elizabeth W. Bennefeld.

 

For WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting.

And there were clouds without rain

27 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in Blessings, Families, Lifestyle, Nature, Personal, Reflections

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So often, driving home on the Memorial Day weekend, the skies were littered with these bright, plump clouds, a brilliant blue background that seemed to reach up forever.

My father was the sexton and groundskeeper for the village cemetery. We children worked for him during the summers, and also, leading up to the Memorial Day weekend, when everything had to be perfect.

This will be the first Memorial Day weekend without him.

My sister posted a picture that she’d scanned in hi-res from the assortment of photographs and letters she took with her back to the East Coast, after Father’s funeral. This one’s from the war years and sent by Father to Mother.

photograph from WW II

They were married before Pearl Harbor. Mother joined the Navy afterward. Father was in the Army [training sergeant] at Fort Dodge, having joined the Army before the U.S. entered the war, which is how he ended up in the same state as Mother.

An interlude for grief

20 Saturday May 2017

Posted by in Blessings, Books, Communication, Creating order, Families

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I find myself overwhelmed by emotion, revisiting in my mind the time close to my mother’s death, seeing her fear over many months, and then the letting go of fear. It is overwhelming to realize once again that she is now free from all fear and free from the continual grief at the ongoing sense of the losses that so altered her life: the sharp dislocation between who she knew that she is and the life that she found herself living. The struggle to live as herself in a disparate world.

I could only try to comfort her. I could not take away the fear because I could not change reality. Her fears were realistic, and her grief was real.

 

And then, I look at where I am finding the most aid and comfort in my own grieving process. A textbook on bridging the gap between grief and bereavement counseling and practice that the grief counselor loaned me, the last time she was here. I think, maybe I also carry a lot of nonfinite grief.

 

SpO2=98%, P=69bpm
BG=117 mg/dL