The first time I drove onto the Delta Loop, I nearly ran off the road at the sight of a cactus bigger than my car.  It rose from the ground in front of a house on Jackson Slough Road, the western edge of the ten-mile circular stretch of levee roads on which I came to live.  I let my car stand at an idle just a few feet from the what someone later identified as a prickly pear.  In that moment it hit me that I had thrown my entire life away and journeyed to a strange new world.  Uncontrollable trembling shook my chest as the magnitude of this change overwhelmed me.

Eight years later, I sail past the surreal foliage without much thought except for its beauty.  Potted jade and ice plants adorn my 8 x 8 deck and the small yard that I’ve fashioned in front of it.  Dozens of fragrant blooms dance on my perfume bush all winter and the vines creep across the plant stand.  Though the deciduous trees shed their leaves in December, everything else in the Delta thrives on the two months of rain and wintry air.

As the California flora radiates energy so, too, do sensations of growth ripple along the fibers of my being.  I came to a few realizations this week and spent four days pushing myself to act on them.  Sparks flew as my nose touched the grindstone in the California lawyer’s office where I work Monday through Thursday.  I had let files accumulate in untidy piles.  Forty years of a lawyer’s instinct for order and diligence had slipped into the morass of not-licensed-here laziness.  By the end of this work day, I had touched and moved forward every file in my little work-cubby.  Mundane and strained though my role there might be, I acquitted myself well this week.

At home, I spent each evening attacking the  piles of clutter which had adhered themselves to every surface.  With donated baskets from a friend, I organized those piles under chairs in my sitting room.  Shoes that have never quite found a home now live in a lidded plastic box in the small space beneath the hanging clothes in my 21-inch closet.  As I sit at my sweet cherry table to type, I see paintings, photographs, and mementos in frames grouped on walls, climbing the stairs under the east-facing window.  Angels perch on shelves, hang from nails, and sit in circles next to table lamps.  My style would not suit many people, but it feels right to me.

For the next three days, I morph into a shop owner and art patron.  My phone will turn its eye on customers and cohorts as they push open the door and stroll through the collective.  A ready smile will greet them from behind the cash stand.  As night deepens, I will putter in my tiny house, with the silence settling like fairy dust on my shoulders.   Each morning, I will stand on the porch and study the winter grime that has accumulated there, daydreaming about new furniture and a summer shade overhead. 

As I drive towards town, a big ship will glide through the channel, and I will tarry at the sight of it, bigger than my car, bigger than my house , bigger than all three houses that I’ve owned put together.  I will watch as it passes our marina, headed towards the confluence of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento.  It will turn left, headed west, towards the Bay and then to the wide open sea.  I will not resume my drive until I can no longer detect even the outline of its stern.  Eventually,  will remain to be seen but the blue of the river and the brief flicker of a swan’s tail in the ripple of the slough.  Only then will I shift my foot to the accelerator, and  continue on my own steady landlocked way.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Succulents in Isleton

Swans in the slough

My perfume bush (right)

My mother stopped giving me beef in late grade school or early high school.  She called the doctor and told him that I vomited every time I ate meat.  “Don’t give it to her,” he allegedly advised.    I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened or if it’s one of those memories that time created for me, but I haven’t eaten red meat since then. 

I attended college in the mid-70s when there were two types of plant-based diets:  Vegetarian, and lacto-ovo vegetarian.  I chose the latter path, because what is life without eggs and butter? Truthfully, I struggled with the rest of it.   I’m not much of a cook, and the mainstay of vegetarians, beans, upset my stomach. This annoying proclivity later morphed into full-blown IBS though I didn’t develop an insufferable intolerance of legumes and dairy until my mid-40s.    For decades, nuts, seeds, eggs, lentils and yogurt comprised my primary protein sources.  

My choice of food did not reflect any moral underpinning.  I ate what my body could process.  Sometimes I tried chicken and occasionally pork or fish, but only rarely and never without profound intestinal regret.  I had vegan friends who rolled their eyes at my shallow disregard for other beings.  I once dated someone who said he couldn’t be around me if I continued to eat anything not plant-based.  I cautioned him not to make me choose between him and butter.  I reminded him that some scientists believe that plants scream when you cut them.  He faded from my life, messaging that he would pray for me.  Nice of him.

It’s late winter in Northern California.  The snow geese and sandhill cranes settle in the flooded fields of our island.  Dark Canadians cut through the grey sky between bouts of torrential rain.  I regret letting my camera batteries grow so old that they no longer hold a charge.  I linger on the levee roads, watching the wide swathes of fluttering white creatures forage in the ruts left by the fall harvest.  They lift from the ground  in twos or threes and land a few feet away, searching in the standing water for food.  Overhead, the raucous cry of cranes signals the approach of nightfall.

Friends recently debated the merits of hunting snow geese on someone’s social media feet.  My fingers hammered a harsh protest against killing the beautiful fowl.  Someone replied with a long tirade about the virtues of snow geese as game and their vast numbers, which he apparently thought would persuade me.  I briefly thought of my cousin Kati, who runs a pig rescue operation and foreswears anything not strictly vegan.  I typed my short response:  I don’t eat meat; and left the conversation.

Driving to Lodi today, I saw row after row of the migratory birds cutting through the air over soggy fallow fields.  My heart swelled with envy as their long formation disappeared near the distant horizon.  I closed my eyes and sent a silent plea:  Let no hunters find them.  Let them journey onward unmolested.

I had sweet potato and carrots for dinner tonight.  No creatures suffered for my nourishment.  I will have farm-fresh eggs for breakfast, scrambled with butter from cows that I can only hope were housed in comfort.  I understand that not everyone likes the geese, and I recognize that many people hunt to eat.  As for myself, I never tire of their noisy arrival in the open land behind our park.  I do not weary of the sight of the flock rising at dawn, spreading their wings, and riding the wind to the next destination in their perennial search for a warmer, more welcoming climate.  I regret only that I remain earthbound as they glide across the sky and leave me standing alone, in the relentless morning rain, wishing that I could fly.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

A week or so ago, I stood outside my tiny house beside my aging Toyota RAV4 and thought about leaves.  Across the gravel road on which my house sits, trees that have become as familiar to me as the Midwestern sunshine rose against the background of a lingering sunset.  Fierce gold had settled into gentle pink.  The outline of the trees against the whisper of retreating rays held me for a long, quiet moment.

I studied the sprinkle of crushed debris on the yard around me.  Those leaves fell from the California oak which towers over my neighbor’s house.  They dissolve into the dirt to feed the scraggly grass and the succulents that have broken through their pots and sent their roots into the soil.  I looked again towards the nearly bare branches, wondering why some leaves succumbed to winter’s hold and float to the ground while others stubbornly cling to their perch.

Today the world’s sports fans will watch two teams compete for the season’s title while I sit in my shop and think about anniversaries and celebrations.  In six day’s time, lovers and partners and spouses will exchange heart-shaped boxes of candy.  They will demurely lower their eyes as envelopes open and cards slide out.  Shy smiles will dawn as the scrawled messages get read aloud.  They will embrace and toast the endurance of their romance for yet another year.

For me, Valentine’s day holds bittersweet memories of a note  thrust into my hand right after the announcement of an impending departure.  But it has more hopeful meaning as well.  On 14 February 1997, I lay in a hospital bed beneath the dour gaze of a middle-aged  pulmonologist.  My neurologist stood beside him, shaking his small grey head and concurring in the lung guy’s pronouncement of my certain and hasty doom.  Six months, he had said.  Have you got someone prepared to take your child?  I had, several people; but I didn’t like to think about that eventuality.  I turned my head to the window, through which the grey light of a cold Kansas City day strained for entry.  Eventually, the two men left.

My son had started kindergarten that year.  On his first day, I struggled to lead him up the stairs from his pre-school to the august heights of a newly promoted elementary student.  He stopped halfway.  He drew his head back and said, Are you going to die before I get big, Mom? And I promised him that I would live to be one-hundred-and-three.  We continued our journey into his next phase of life while my heart sank and my anxiety blossomed.

But I did live.  Now John Prine plays on the Bluetooth speaker outside while my friend Moira arranges for a cup of Earl Grey from the coffee shop.  Little whisps of clouds drift past.  Occasionally snow geese or cranes cut across the blue.  Ruby brings an egg sandwich.  One or two customers, not yet settled at the bar for the game, wander into the store and peruse the art.  I sit and think, and sip my tea, and watch the shadows of paper cranes from the mobile in the corner dance across the ceiling.  John Prine keeps singing.  Cars go past.  The days of another year scatter at my feet, like the dry leaves that blow across the levee road at home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®