On This Day, Sept. 10, 1016

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Ten years ago today, I was in Nova Scotia and this is the post I made:

Cosmos Flower and Will o’ the Wasp: Flower of the Day, Sept 10, 2016

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I couldn’t decide which of these two very similar shots I liked best, so I’m posting both of them. If you have a favorite, let me know.

img_5281img_5280I photographed these Cosmos along the walkway to the Alexander Graham Bell Museum. A man asked me to identify several of the flowers and said he, too, had photographed them. I asked if the museum was interesting and he said, “About as interesting as watching paint dry!” He turned around and walked back toward the museum with me, but I veered off to take photos of a little boy flying a kite he’d made in a kite making workshop in the museum. Wish I’d been there for that!! In the end, I left without going into the museum. I decided with so little time left here that I’d rather drive along the bay and then go back to my motel and sit by the water in an Adirondack chair to write my blog.

For more photos, look here: https://ceenphotography.com/2016/09/09/flower-of-the-day-dahlia-11/

To Do or Not to Do

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Today I found two pieces in a file marked “unpublished,” so decided to share them here. This first one was written in December of 2025:

My entire life I have been a doer. As a child, most of my games involved setting up little stores or building houses for first my paper dolls, then for Cisette or Jan, the predecessors to Barbie. I arranged every cupboard and closet in our house, to my father’s distress, at least when it came to his bathroom shelves.

When I was a teacher, much of my weekend time involved the grading of essays, with my comments sometimes equaling the wordcount of the essays themselves. I shirked in no task.
But now more than 40 years later, I am sitting in the Tulum airport writing this essay whose topic is meant to be how I have decided for the last ten or so years of my life to stop feeling the need to accomplish and to start relaxing and doing nothing! With this in mind, while waiting for the arrival of our plane, we have come to the end portion of the airport that looks out onto the jungle. A toucan just flew by and two huge raven-like birds have taken residence at the top of a very tall communication tower. I can’t help but draw out my camera to take photos and then Jill calls my attention to the shattered window that overlooks the runway  and returning from the ladies room, I see the reflection of star-shaped overhead lights in the polished stone corridor.

And once again, I am doing–taking photos and editing. So it seems as though my resolution must be delayed for a bit until I am in less-interesting environs.

Then it occurs to me that maybe communicating my life via art or writing or photographs is leisure for me–forcing me to take the time to notice before responding to what I have noticed by sharing it with others. To do nothing, one would need to be in what equals a catatonic state, and I remember once again what I once discovered––that doing nothing is a wasting of life. To “do” is to make use of the gift of time by spending it richly––both doing and sharing what you enjoy most.

And so I put down my computer and reach for my camera, intent on doing nothing  on my own terms, by doing what I want to do and translating it into some means of sharing it. Doing nothing but what I want to do which is just this!!!

 

 

Blast from the Blog, Sep 8 2016 “Inelegant Obsession”

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This control board of the plane I flew from Prince Edward Island to Nova Scotia on is slightly less daunting than the dashboard of the Jeep Cherokee they pawned off on me as a replacement for the simple economy car I requested. The flight took one half hour. Renting the car (even though I’d filled out all the paperwork on the internet) and figuring out how to operate the monstrosity they gave me took two hours!!!

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The beast!!! I still haven’t figured out how to turn on the radio and tremble at the thought of mistakenly turning on the four wheel drive

 

Inelegant Obsession

I’d love to be elegant while I’m obsessing,
but if I told you how, I’d only be guessing.
The man at the counter said yoga’s the answer
to two hour waits, and smart cars and cancer.

I told him that yoga’s more easily done
in my pool or on mats spread out in the sun––
Not two hours before midnight when you’re feeling sad
’cause the car you pre-rented is not to be had

and instead you’re confronted with a Jeep Cherokee
with all bells and whistles included for free!
Yet each feature they’ve added is cryptic and puzzling.
Screen like a space ship and gasoline-guzzling.

I can’t find the lighter to plug in my Nuvi.
The radio screen is showing a movie,
but I can’t find a plug to plug in my phone
and I’m out in this parking lot, stressed and alone.

After one hour of standing and waiting to rent it
and one more in the parking lot, how I repent it!
I go on the road in the inky black dark
with no place to stop and no place to park.

My GPS empty of power and knowledge,
to find the right route would take training in college.
No route numbers have I, I can’t see the map.
My phone out of power sits limp on my lap.

The screen gives me options for stations galore,
but no arrow to choose them, just one button more
for feature after feature that I cannot use.
I wish I had knowledge.  I wish I had booze!!!

When I try to turn on the overhead light,
the moonroof zips open and try as I might,
I can’t get it closed but just open it more,
so the wind whips my hair with a terrible roar.

I’ve always loved traveling wild and free,
but it now seems travel’s evolved beyond me.
Where is my confidence and my elan?
That air of achievement, that air of “I can?”

When I get to the motel two hours in arrears,
when the clerk asks how are you, I explode in tears.
I tell him my story, like a silly old fool––
but he doesn’t snicker and he isn’t cruel.

“See that?” he said, waving a hand at my phone.
He shook his gray head and gave a small moan.
“Don’t know how to use one–not me nor my wife.
It seems like technology’s plaguing our life.”

He dished out a Kleenex and almost at once,
I found I was feeling much less of a dunce.
I may be a fool and an old one at that,
but it’s so reassuring to share that coned hat!

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https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/elegant/

Throwback Edition: Universal Biography

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This is a Throwback Edition of a poem published on today’s date,Sept. 7, in 2018

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Universal Biography

In the end, all the same.
Although remembering your name,
eventually no one knows
the you that lived beneath your clothes.

They may see your charming smile,
your tender looks or cunning guile,
but they won’t have the faintest clue
of the authentic, inner you.

Perhaps we start out all the same;
so who’s the one that we should blame
when some turn into Phyllis Dillers
and others into serial killers?

Ghandi, Hitler, Bundy, and
the rest of us, by nature’s hand
instilled with sin or piety
in infinite variety.

But still, at end of life, we fall,
not so different after all.
At the very end of day,
returned to dust, we blow away.

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The Sunday Whirl Wordle 773, Sep 6, 2026

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Midnight Fantasy

Filtered clouds like plumes of smoke above us gently flow
while threads of mosses weave a layered fabric far below––
filling forest cracks with ruffled tufts of green
that cushion midnight footsteps through this magic scene.

 

Prompt words for The Sunday Whirl are: plumes tufts mosses fantasy fabric filtering threads forest cracks layer ruffle flow. (Image created with AI)

“Busted” for Rewind

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gossardphoto downloaded from internet                             


Busted

Where once I was secure on top,
there’s now a tendency to plop.
So when I dance and when I bop,
unless I want to swing and flop,
I need to engineer a stop–
a sort of midriff traffic cop.

A reblog from this date (Sep 6) 2016

Migraines and Driving

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Migraines and Driving: What Every Driver Needs to Know

stephanie Butler asked me to share this article on Migraines.

Attempts at Fibbing Friday, Sep 4, 2026

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For Fibbing Friday, Sept 4, 2026 the assignment is:

1. Battlecruiser – Someone addicted to viewing divorce courts
2. Bread and cheese – A deconstructed grilled sandwich.
3. Cows and kisses – A cowboy’s check list for the weekend
4. Dicky dirt – transcripts of Nixon’s impeachment
5. Lady Godiva – The wife of  a noble snorkeler
6. Mork and Mindy – Mispronunciation of of a chop and a popular dance of the 30’s and 40’s
7. Daisy roots – Li’l Abner’s wife’s scalp when she didn’t have time to her monthly touchup.
8. Dustbin lid – A popular hat style in the Dirty Thirties
9. Peckham Rye –  to attack one’s sandwich with small appetite
10. Ruby Murray – Bill, of Groundhog Day and Ghostbusters, when embarrassed.

Here is the link to the prompt: https://pensitivity101.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/fibbing-friday-4th-september-2026/

Pull Up A Seat Photo Challenge

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Here is my house guest Julie and friends pulling up a seat at a friend’s party

Blast from the Blog, Sept 3, 2018

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Dead Possum

A rude surprise,
it lay like breakfast rejected
on the patio outside the dogs’ sleeping room.

The dogs were restless this morning,
barking for their kibble,
unwilling to follow the rules
that decreed paws known all too well
as lethal weapons needed to be contained,
the dogs in their open cages before I’d venture out to feed.
But some wildness recently sated
drove them to assault the door
and refuse repeated demands to
go to their beds.
They staged their impatient war dance,
telling with growls and claws
the tale of the hunt—
That won battle.

I lock them in their cages
and, order restored, I dish their meals
and free them to their feed.
I walk behind them to secure the sliding glass door,
gather dust pan and broom, plastic pail.
Their quarry too large to fit, let alone be lofted
by a dust pan, I grasp the tail and lower the possum
like a colossal tea bag for a dipping,
into the wash bucket,
walk the long path down to the lower wall,
heft it over into deep underbrush
of the vacant lot next door.

I own that land.
It has been the burial place
of sixteen generations of those possums
too slow for escape,
with teeth and claws insufficient for defense––
every one a battle won
by the dogs
and each one equally mourned––
their wild ferocity not enough
to best even dogs seemingly grown docile
until these night battles
gone unnoticed in my dreams
are brought to view in light of day.

The possum’s fur wet and matted but only slightly torn,
every time I hopefully delude myself
that perhaps it’s playing witness to its name
and only playing possum.
Optimistically, I don heavy gloves and winter coat,
ready for the struggle as I try to save
what an adult part of me knows
no longer is in need of saving.

Each corpse ironically made heavier by loss of life,
that dead weight of it
is echoed in a central part of me
as I try to lift with reverence
this newest evidence
that most of life
and all of death
is out of our control.

A sad one this day…