Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 5)

Hallowe’en Heroics

November 1, 2024 / / 2 Comments

Here’s a little gem from the archives: 2010 to be exact, when I was supply teaching in Peterborough and getting to know my neighbours on Charlotte Street. Happy Hallowe’en!

Today I scored huge points with my skinhead neighbour’s children.

Every year at the end of October I start to think about how I’m going to evade Hallowe’en.  I hate the skeletons, gravestones, witches and, yes, even the spiders.  I don’t get why the entire continent gets such a charge out of thinking about icky, dark, evil things for a month every fall.  Fall is icky enough without the ghosts and the orange and black.  Why make it colder, scarier, crueller?

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2024 Gratitude List

October 14, 2024 / / 2 Comments

This is the tenth Gratitude List that you’ll find on Cosmic Prose, signalling ten years of daily journaling, in which I choose a few bright moments from each day to crystalize in print. Somehow I never run out of entries, and somehow each year’s list has its own special flavour.

This has been an epic year of social and professional blossoming, punctuated by meaningful moments both at home and abroad. Here’s to happiness!

  • A job that makes my days feel good
  • My car is home!
  • 5/5 days
  • When Thursday is a second Wednesday
  • The breast clinic is looking after me
  • The circus is getting a new ringleader
  • At least the underground parking lot is always there for me
  • A full day
  • Not doing schoolwork on weekends
  • Double naps
  • Getting the chores done
  • Soon I will be writing again
  • Chauffeurs
  • Competent supply teachers
  • When I think I’m in tune
  • Good health
  • A writing group
  • A third friend
  • Finishing assessments
  • Improvements
  • Less pain today
  • Finishing progress reports
  • Kale and bacon pizza
  • One day without fruits or vegetables is not a big deal
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When in Rome…

July 19, 2024 / / 0 Comments

My first impressions of Rome were not so favourable.  It seemed to be a city made of garbage and graffiti.  I saw it on the bus from the airport to the train station, and then again on the walk from the train station to the apartment.  Garbage and graffiti everywhere.

“You’re going to love Europe,” I told my niece.  “Everything here is so pretty.  The ornate buildings.  The immaculate gardens.  The cobblestone streets.  Everything.

No, not everything.  Definitely not the trajectory from the Termini train station to our humble abode.  Rome, I thought, is a dirty, unpalatable city.  I’m not so sure I like it here.

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Lest We Forget: Pass it On

July 6, 2024 / / 4 Comments

I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day.  It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.

But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.

Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem.  Rows of crosses, row on row.  Thousands and thousands of them.  Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks.  Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage.  Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks.  Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial.  Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.

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2022 Gratitude List

October 13, 2022 / / 1 Comment

It’s a few days late, but here is my annual Gratitude List — 365 days’ worth of small things noticed and appreciated. I now have 12 of these lists inhabiting my hard drive, and each one gives a snapshot of a year that is unlike those that came before. This year’s seems to be dominated by work, as I started yet another new job, and then another. There is always much to learn, much to celebrate, and much to leave behind as a fresh, new year unfolds. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

  • the lost, found
  • the smell of leaves under the tires of my bike, the weight of the handlebars, the whir of the wheels
  • pedalling, noticing, breathing
  • all of the things that are better than they were
  • I, who am competent…
  • I, who rocked that lesson
  • and she who left it before it fell apart
  • when the magic letters come together to make words
  • report cards done five days early
  • a down duvet
  • zoom friends
  • deliverance
  • the paperwork
  • a long prep period to rewrite my report card comments
  • when they learn things
  • the rain put a quick end to a very painful outdoor math lesson
  • I caught S prancing to the office for a banana
  • I kept last year’s sketchbooks
  • I caught the last half of my French class
  • tag is fun
  • L had a good day
  • The yellow water on the floor was largely ignored
  • extra quizzes
  • schoolyard coding
  • hamburger soup
  • a hair shuttle
  • an autumn walk to the Value Mart
  • getting some planning done
  • approval
  • they’re always good for no good reason
  • the explosion happened on someone else’s watch
  • I slept a long sleep
  • I’ve been other places, done other things, lived other lives
  • there is more to come
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Go Gently

January 18, 2022 / / 4 Comments

Work.  All my life, I have allowed it to define me.

As a student (even as a very young student), my work was to try to be the smartest kid in class.  Let’s face it.  I was a clumsy, homely child with thick glasses and a lazy eye.  But school, I could do.  And I did it well.  It became my “thing” —  so much so, that I decided never to leave. 

And so now, decades later, I get in my car every morning and drive 45 minutes to another school, where I pour all my energy into the young lives and minds before me.  I just want them to learn, so badly.  To light up with new words, new ideas, new ways of thinking. 

But today, I went too far.  Snow had been falling all night.  It was due to continue for hours.  School buses were cancelled.  Other teachers headed onto the streets and turned back because of the weather.  And I kept going.

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A Holiday Sing-Along

April 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Twice this year, classes in my school have had to quarantine for the holidays due to positive COVID test results in the building. I wrote this little ditty over the Christmas break, and added a special Easter update today. Feel free to sing along.

 I wore my goggles and my mask: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I sanitized my withered hands: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I don't have plexiglass
 In my cramped, crowded class:
 I stepped sideways, but alas!
   Somebody sneezed on me. 

     Now we're getting COVID for Christmas,
      Students and teachers are mad.
     We're getting COVID for Christmas,
      'Cause Dougie's been nothing but bad.
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Réveillon

December 28, 2020 / / 1 Comment 
 Ce virus minuscule
     se propage
   sur les ailes de notre liberté
 Enferme-le en nous enfermant
    Sans ailes
       nous tous
            tomberont
  
 Cette piqure magique:
      notre seule arme
   contre l'envahissement de notre habitat natal
 Sorciers, sorcières, donnez-la-nous,
    Nous, les becs ouverts
        dans le nid de notre folie
  
 Et puis, ayant été piqués,
     nos corps tremblants se lèveront
   Nos plumes repousseront
          Nous nous percherons
                 vacillant
              au bord de l'inconnu
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2020 Gratitude List: A Covid Thanksgiving

October 14, 2020 / / 3 Comments

Did you know that Daniel Defoe, author of the iconic Robinson Crusoe, also wrote a chilling Journal of the Plague Year? This year’s Gratitude List is a sort of Plague Journal as well, with a five-month preface and a seven-month inventory of hidden kindnesses in changing times.

And so, from 2019’s indoor festivals to 2020’s back yard Thanksgiving, here are 578 tiny treasures from an otherwise tumultuous year:

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