Silent Sunday: September 29, 2013

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Brown and Sepia

Cee is challenging everyone to post color-themed pictures. Why brown and sepia? Well, why not? They’re warm and infinitely varied, and they’re everywhere. For example…

Wheelwright shop – Williamsburg, Virginia

Sailing in Maine

South Dakota: Standing on the uttermost edge of the normal world
staring down at the Badlands

Wordless Wednesday – September 25, 2013

Yesterdaily post: Talents I wish I had…

(With thanks to the one and only Rarasaur. Without her, I would have overlooked this WordPress daily post suggestion – “tell us about a talent you’d love to have, but don’t” – entirely. As it is, I’m only a day late…)

Oh, there are lots of things I wish I could do effortlessly. Draw. Run. Make my hair do what I want it to do. (We’ve come to an understanding, my hair and me. I  wash and brush it as needed and let it do pretty much what it prefers, and it sits on top of my head and points in various directions and smirks.) But none of those is the biggie, the talent I long to have and never expect to master.

If I only could get organized. (To the tune of that song from the Wizard of Oz, you know, the one the scarecrow sings. Or maybe each of Dorothy’s buddies gets a verse of his own. If I were organized, I’d know, wouldn’t I?)

But I’m not organized. I tackle all sorts of things…I write, I blog, I take photos, I bake, I knit, I, I, I get interested in a lot of stuff. Shiny! The world is so full of a number of things, as that poet, you know, Whitman, or Stevenson, or Plath, said. And I want to play with most of them.

Focus, I don’t got it. If only I could just set most of my mental toys gently but firmly to one side and concentrate on the most important. I’m not so sure that would work well, though.

How do you cope when you’re working hard on a project and reach a dead end, a puzzle you don’t see how to solve? Well, I need to concentrate on something completely different – then my mind wanders off exploring and comes back with solutions to unrelated problems. When I force myself to drive grimly straight ahead toward one goal, I wind up exhausted, depressed, and incompetent. When I keep juggling, sooner or later one of my problem balls hatches like a Czarist jeweled Easter egg…shiny!…and hands me an answer.

Maybe my best plan is to treat my mind like my hair: just learn to live with its quirks.

Shapeless Saturday NonSonnet

                            Crickets

I heard their noise tonight. Too soon, too soon.
Their grating chirp belongs to fall, and I’m
Just ready to stretch out, luxuriate
In soft fruit spilling juice, warm days,
And evenings still day-bright at nine o’clock.
I glare at seven o’clock’s half-faded sky.
How can it look like this in June? Because,
My mind pipes up, this is September now.

Long days, fresh peaches – those sweet treasures lie
The other side of winter. Wait it out.
(My mind is such a pest. I hate it when
She knows her stuff.) You sound like crickets, Mind.
Shut up, don’t give advice, just let me sulk.
(She won’t, of course.)

Friday Fictioneers: Down the Shore

Friday Fictioneers strikes again! Curious about what that means? Just follow the link, read the guidelines, look at the picture, and contribute your own itty-bitty hundred word story. This time, the photo prompt makes me think of a boardwalk shop at the New Jersey Shore…after this past year’s troubles.

Down the Shore

There’s not much left of the old place. Storm, winter, fire…not much left. He can still see it so plain, though. Goblets, paintings – frame and all! – pretty dresses for the next pretty girl.

The store was his life. He knows they’re all wondering if he can outlast it. True, he feels a little off balance. But one good thing about getting old, you find out you can’t live in the past. The past is dead, and if you try to stay there too long, you’ll be the same.

He turns away, heads for the car. “You all right, Grandpop?” Joey asks.

“Me? Sure thing.”

Wordless Wednesday – September 18, 2013

Well, that settles that

I’ve learned my lesson. All right, I was surprised to see wild turkeys in the woods of western Pennsylvania back in the summer. But after all, forests in thinly populated areas are exactly where wild turkeys belong.

Where don’t they belong? In the South Jersey suburbs. But that’s where I saw them – two of them – only yesterday, strutting out of someone’s front yard, across the sidewalk, and into the street right in front of my car. And I didn’t have a camera.

From now on, a camera goes with me everywhere.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

This week, WordPress is asking for “inside” photos – and you can’t get much farther inside than a cave…

A couple of months ago, we visited Lincoln Caverns in western Pennsylvania.

There are unlikely sights inside the solid-looking earth under our feet.

Travel themes: Multicolored

It’s one of those “go wild” weeks in travel themes 😀 – Ailsa is asking for multicolored photos. My kind of request!

The Badlands in South Dakota. I’ve seen white sand before. I’ve seen yellow sand. But pink sand, delicately separating white and yellow? That’s what made this picture worth taking.

Then there was this garden in Williamsburg, Virginia – I think the basic idea was “Let’s see how many different shapes and colors we can squeeze into the smallest possible area!” It worked, too.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Famous for battles, not so famous for wild color schemes. But there this house sits, right on a main street, showing off the brightest paint available.

And this is kind of cheating…I only traveled as far as my basement to open The Stash Tub, stand on tiptoes, and click away. Maybe I should claim this one’s a souvenir of my trip to the Erewhon Islands, where all the sheep grow rainbow colored wool?