Blogging from A to Z in April - The Letter S - Wednesday 22nd April 2015

Wednesday 22nd April 2015 - The Letter S

 

S is for SOLROS, which is 'SUNFLOWER' in Swedish, one of Tina Downey's favourite flowers. I want to honour Tina's memory with a sunflower for the letter S. 

 

I took theses pictures before 20th August 2009, when my daughter Elisabet was five years old. I wanted to post them for the memorial post for Tina Downey on 8th September 2014. I thought this one lone sunflower was symbolic of Tina's strong will to live and reach out to others. But I couldn't find it until now after going through several memory cards and about 6000 photos.

The photo quality of the last picture is really bad - it is not even in focus. But it shows the unkempt part of our garden behind the garage, just sand, gravel, two broken bicycles and an abandoned baby carriage. No one planted this sunflower. There must have been seeds that were just dumped there. And only one plant survived.

I wish Tina could have seen these pictures. I wonder what she would have thought? She was a great one for taking photos. She might have liked them.

I wish I could have met Tina in person. We never did. We just chatted through our blogs and the blog hops that we did together. Thank you Tina for inspiring me.


And thank you all for taking the time to visit with me here.


Best wishes,
Anna

First Commenter:
Tanya Walton
of
Allotments4You

A Sunflower for Tina Downey

A Sunflower for Tina Downey

Tina Downey passed away on Saturday night 23rd August.  Here is an Etsy Treasury full of Sunflowers.

It has taken some time to collect my thoughts about Tina. This was not an easy blog post for me to do.

Tina was a special blogging friend to me. We had our secret language, Swedish, that we had fun with together, in spite of the fact that Tina did not always have Swedish letters on her computer keyboard. It made spelling a challenge.

I can speak and write Swedish every day here in Sweden. No big deal. But to do it with someone like Tina Downey, who had preserved it like a precious treasure from childhood, while being surrounded by a sea of English, was a humbling experience. She had what I might want to call "linguistic courage".

I'll miss her slant on language, on life and I'll miss her kindness and her unique sense of humour.

I am still looking for a photo that I took a few years ago of a lone sunflower that grew up out of a pile of leaves and dirt behind our garage. I'll post it if I find it, because it would be an appropriate symbol of Tina's tenacity and spirit.

Kind regards,
Anna

P.S.

Tina's commented on my blog post for IWSG om March 5th. I cherish it as her last message to me. And as always so kind and thoughful. She wrote about her asthma. Take a look at the comments here.

First Commenter:

Alex J. Cavanaugh