I’ve seen the quote attributed to various people, most often to Malia Makana but sometimes to other writers, almost all female. The author, the speaker, avows that she has differently assembled herself. Presumably time has passed since the person to whom the assurance is given has seen her. “I put the pieces back differently,” she vouchsafes.

I feel her, whomever she is.

I recently got a message from a man who only knows me through my writing and my comments on his poetry. We’ve never met in real time. I believe we might have spoken on the phone once, years ago, at least a decade. He’s married to someone whom I have met, in the days before they married. They both write.

In the gentleman’s message, he commented on the emotions he thinks permeate recent social media posts of mine. His sincerity reached me. I do not agree with his assessment, but I concede that neither of us can claim objectivity. I do not know what motivates him; as for myself, I’m trying to survive. Flying under the radar serves me, as do cryptic replies and gentle smiles.

The crows returned to the Delta this week. They settle on guy wires and the spindly branches of winter trees. They hover on the levee roads, deigning to move only if you tap your horn and insist. With breathtaking wingspans and fat, cornfield-fed bodies, they could raise a small dog into the air but don’t bother. They catch my attention as I drive to work. I wonder where they live in warmer months but not enough to even run a simple Internet search. They’re here; and in the spring, with the snow geese, they leave. We stay behind and watch as they lift their unwieldy figures into air that we cannot even touch.

The acquaintance who messaged me comments on what he sees as dark moods. As I read his words, a strange sensation courses through me. He has no idea. I stumble through most days in a daze, tired, puzzled, stunned even. I see the grey hair and quiet eyes in my mirror. I truly had no idea that I would make it to seventy, but at the same time, I never forgot that I promised to live practically forever. Both cannot be true, so I just kept walking, best foot forward, hoping for the best — whatever one could say that might be.

Another person whom I know has gone abroad and remarks, again on social media, that holidays depress her. She sees herself as having failed to acquire the packaged life that she though women must have Husband, kids, PTA meetings, a spotless house, deftly wrapped presents under the tree. I understand what she feels. I perceive myself as blowing that chance three-fold. Even as I type those words, I hear protests about how great people think I am, how much good I have done, how many children I helped. Their words come too late, decades after I internalized the droning mantras about what makes a real woman.

Yet I am not unhappy, despite the occasional bout of melancholy. Unbidden smiles do spring to my face. Jokes occasionally tickle my fancy. Small children come into my shop and hunt for the 3D dragons that we’ve hidden low shelves and their squeals of delight satisfy me. They show me their finds. When I ask them to pick one to keep, they study the inch-high figures, select one, and scurry through the rooms of our store to re-hide the rest. One cannot ask for much more than this: To provide a safe space for people’s sons and daughters to play while their grown-ups browse the beautiful art.

If longing overcomes me from time to time, it shares space with a growing sense of content. The shelf on which I once displayed copies of my book stands empty. I only sold a couple hundred copies, but the other day, a customer mentioned having read it. “It took me all year,” she remarked. “I read one piece each week. They delighted me.” She paid for whatever she had selected that day, wished me “Happy Holidays”, and left the store, unaware of the absolute astonishment coursing through my veins. Is this how real writers feel, I asked myself. Like someone tied a string to their heart and took them across the ocean tied to the stem of a golden sailboat?

I think of all the people who delighted in taking a tap hammer to that same organ, smashing it to the pieces that I’ve painstakingly reglued to form my new self. I can’t lay claim to putting the pieces back together in a different pattern with deliberate intention. It’s more a matter of fumbling, fingers numb, hastening to jam the jagged shards in place before the super glue hardens. I pry open clamps meant for holding wood and ease them onto the fragile porcelain of my splintered psyche. Too late, I recall the Japanese practice of repairing broken bowls with liquid gold. Oh well, I tell myself, with an inward shrug. I’m far from perfect, but perhaps, in the end, I will suffice.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The Crystal Gazer

Sara Teasdale 1884 – 1933

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro.

Being a recovering Catholic on Christmas has its own special fragrance of irony. Roman Catholics disdain that universal badge of Christianity that might have sustained me when I realized that the church itself contributed to the derailment of my emotional stability. But no: Catholics hold themselves out as a different breed. When you walk away from the church, you leave a cult and all its trappings behind your weary self.

What does Christmas become, when it’s not a celebration of the birth of the son of an immigrant visited by an angel with news that a divine child would come to her? The secular holiday has Santa, an outgrowth of a Catholic Saint; and little elves who serve him while a rosy-cheeked Mrs. Claus beams from the sidelines. You can do that, of course. You haul the artificial tree home from the box store and scatter the family ornaments through its branches. You invent traditions and borrow a few from your childhood with which to delight your offspring. The Tree Elf brings a present on the first night that the tree twinkles in your living room. Santa uses the same paper every year, to distinguish his gifts from yours. You sprinkle silver Hershey’s Kisses on the front walk, and explain that one of the elves must have dragged the red bag across the snow and worn a hole in it. Every year a train circles the floor and a small stuffed animal peeks out of the stocking.

But what does it mean? As the single mother of an only child, I cultivated families to get a little of the group cheer that flavored my childhood Decembers. We went caroling with the daycare group one year. During pre-school, we got invited to people’s homes where wine flowed freely and steaming mugs of chocolate smelled like peppermint. Every undertaking smacked of frantic efforts to stave off despair, or failure. Would my son remember those days with fondness, or would he consider that he had been deprived of normalcy? Should I have taken him to Mass? He seemed reluctant to sit on Santa’s lap at the mall. Had I explained that tradition well enough to make it fun?

I understand that I have romanticized the holidays of my memory. I know the grimness of certain immutable aspects of our household. The vagaries of our home life drove the scarcity of commercial trappings. Our mother could only afford to give us small presents. Anything of value certainly originated with my father’s mother or the S&H green stamps redemption program. I never felt cheated, though. Everything under the tree delighted us. The cookies on the aluminum tray tasted sweet and billowy. Wonderful scents filled the night air as we walked to midnight Mass. If anything awful happened on any given Christmas, I have thankfully suppressed any recollection of it. Only the lingering strains of “Silent Night” run through my mind, its serene melody mingling with the lively bounce of songs about Rudolph and his gang of reindeers.

My son came to California a few days after I moved here to help me unpack and celebrate Christmas. He had a little tree delivered from Amazon. We hung lights from the one big window and went to Christmas dinner at the home of some folks that I knew who lived in Windsor. I got him a banjo. I don’t remember what he gave me, but I’m sure he put a lot of thought into its selection; he always does. We rode the train to San Francisco on Christmas Eve and went to the top of Coit Tower. We walked the city streets until we found an open Chinese restaurant, where we feasted on our favorite things. I have to say, that Christmas shines as one of my best.

This year, I will spend Christmas with my sister Joyce, following which I will drive to Kansas City to see my old friends. I saw my son last year for Christmas and this summer for his birthday, so we won’t be together this year. I think he has plans, though, which I am hoping will bring joy to his life.

When my son was three or four, we went to church with some friends on Christmas. I stood around feeling awkward and out of place while Patrick visited with a few well-appointed ladies who found his curls charming. One of them bent down and said, “Do you know whose birthday is today, little boy?”

Patrick chortled. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “It’s Uncle Steve’s birthday!”

I can’t say which expression I more clearly remember, the shock on the woman’s face or the delight on my son’s little cherub countenance. He was right, of course. This year, my baby brother would have turned 66, had he not died alone one summer’s day in 1997. The day will always have that bittersweet note of a lost loved one for me, another birthday he will not see, another German chocolate cake that won’t get baked, another dance that none of us enjoy as the music swells around us and your friend and mine, Stephen Patrick Corley, kicks up his fancy leather-shod heels.

So, this is Christmas. Another year over and a new one nearly begun. I sit in the shop that I founded in the small, struggling town of Isleton, in the California Delta, and listen to Bing Crosby on my Bluetooth speaker outside. I had a rash of customers mid-day, before the Sunday act started at the local beer room. It’s quiet now, and gloom begins to gather as the sun struggles to finish its duty from behind the clouds. The sky spans gray, but it won’t snow. It might rain, though; but with any luck, I will make it home before the downpour.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

My mother died on 21 August 1985, at just before seven in the morning, two weeks before my thirtieth birthday and just under three weeks from her fifty-ninth. She never got to heal from decades of trauma or help her children do the same. I have spent the last four decades trying to recover for both of us.

My long, slow slide into our shared recovery often finds me walking paths that she might traverse, in another time, another place, but so similar as to meld into a shadowy memory. When I pull into the parking lot of a thrift store — the junkier, the better — I hear her voice exclaim that this will be a goldmine. She steps in the dusty aisles with me, lifting a dish now and then to glance at the marking. Ah, Haviland, she would say, with a knowing smile. I used to have a collection of Limoges soup bowls that she and I had found together. I don’t know what happened to them when I moved; perhaps they made their way to Saver’s in one of the manydonation boxes.

In my mother-in-law’s hutch, I keep the yellow clay pitcher from my mother’s bedside. During her last illness, we kept it filled with ice and water. It’s nothing special, not from a monetary sense, but it means a lot to me. Right now it’s filled with coins and dollar bills. I used to throw change in a blue tea pot that my sister’s daughter game me. When I downsized, I gave the whole teapot, coins and all, to my son. I started over with my mother’s pitcher when I moved to California. I don’t have any plans for the accumulated money except that now, I suppose, the pennies will become collector’s items. Mother might find that funny.

I get my once-auburn hair from mom. In grade school, they called me “the red-headed crippled girl”. The little boys pulled my pigtails and I would struggle to get away from them. I remember my mother combing out the braids and telling me not to worry, that some day it would not matter if I walked funny. I’m still waiting but I don’t wear my hair down much anymore.

After all the kids moved out of the house, my mother took up gardening. She filled in the space where the driveway used to go down into a garage under the house and planted flowers there. She dug up the backyard for vegetables and planted tomatoes on the long strip facing south at the side. Somewhere in a box under the bed in my sleeping loft, I have a photograph of my mother on a bench at the far back of the yard where we used to have a swing set. She has a scarf tied around her hairless head. My nephew Rick stands beside her. The chemotherapy had taken its toll in ways far more impactful than her hair loss, but that seemed to bother her more than anything. It must have been my sister Joyce who found the pretty scarves for Mom, since Joyce lived nearby and took such good care of her. I didn’t inherit my mother’s green thumb, but succulents grow themselves in California . I surround myself with them, perhaps in something of an homage to the beautiful garden in which my mother might have enjoyed a peaceful old age, had she lived.

When I sit on my porch among those hardy plants, my mother’s memory comes to me in something far too pleasant to describe as a haunting. She had a way of lifting one eyebrow that sent me into hysterical giggles. I went to the symphony with her a lot during high school, and she never failed to get into conversation with those in the seats around us. But she insistent on silence when the music started. Once, when my parents went together and I stayed home, two women kept talking through the first piece. My mother finally leaned down and said, in a loud stage whisper, “Must you talk?” One of them turned around and snapped, “Yes, we must.” They turned out to be reviewers.

In the decade during which my mother’s life calmed enough for jaunts, she and my father took to driving out into the country. I never got to go along on one of those jaunts. By that time, I must have been living in South Saint Louis, consuming too much single malt and pursuing a mediocre college career. But I heard about them. I vividly recall her describing a day in St. Genevieve, Missouri. Her eyes shone as she talked about their lunch, some antique store that she liked, and the beauty of the countryside. I’ve never been there; I suspect it’s not the same as my mother saw it, all those years ago and through eyes which longed to behold a little quiet goodness.

My parents instituted a kind of uneasy truce between them in what they did not anticipate would be the last years of my mother’s life, between the late 1970s and 1985. Dad had quit drinking or taken it underground. In 1977, he suffered a major heart attack which ultimately necessitated cardiac bypass surgery. Reportedly he asked the recovering room nurse how many bypasses they had given him. “Seven,” she said. He claimed to have contemplated and then asked the record number for a single operation. When told “eight”, he gleefully demanded, “Wheel me back in, I want two more!” My mother told the story with a girlish laugh while my father rolled his eyes. They acted like that, in the last years of their married life — more like the post-war newly weds that I imagine them having been. The chaos and turmoil that besieged our family seemed to fade into the background. My mother continued working, my father helped our neighbor in his upholstery shop, and they went on daytrips to small towns in the Missouri countryside.

In the fifteen or so years that I served as an attorney for children in high conflict households and the foster system, I learned a lot which applied to my own childhood. From that perspective, I gazed backwards at the choices our mother made, the most pivotal being to stay. We learn in studying family violence that survivors remain in the home for many reasons, mostly associated with the belief that they have no where to go and no way to take care of themselves or their children on their own. In 2025, I hope this reality has evolved and that more and more survivors get out and get help. As for myself, and speaking only for myself, I will be satisfied if I can heal in ways that my mother never lived to experience; and if the generational curse does not corrupt my son any more than it might already have done. He deserves the chance for happiness that my mother so longed to find, on those Sunday drives, forty years ago, in the Missouri of another era.

Mugwumpishly tendered.

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®