I’ve lived full-time at Park Delta Bay RV & Tiny House Resort since 2018 and in all that time, I had not had any property stolen from my lot until now.

It took me a few days to decide that my gardening tools had gone missing.  I hired a young man to clean my porch and my friend Michelle randomly happens by from time to time.  Therefore when I first noticed that the tools had been moved from the chair on which I had set them, I had to reach out to James and Michelle before assuming a nefarious occurrence.  Neither had put them anywhere else.

Strangely, nothing else disappeared, including a 100-foot extension cord on a heavy-duty wheel.  I set the tools on the topmost chair in a stack of four, placed there so James could wash the old wood carrier that I use for a gardening caddy.   I had seven implements: Three trowels, two hand-rakes, one of those skinny things that you use to plant seeds, and an excellent pair of Fiskar snippers.  Other than the snippers, they had mostly come from Target and cost under ten bucks each.  But those Fiskars had set me back a penny or two, and I had taken good care of them.

After checking with James and Michelle, I posted on our residents’ Facebook Group.  I phrased my query as though I assumed someone just borrowed the seven tools.   It almost had to be someone who lives in the park.  We sit below the levee so anyone jogging by wouldn’t notice a particular lot’s accoutrements.  My porch can’t easily be seen even from the interior gravel road that circles around the western side of the community.  One must traverse the parking space, the flagstone walk, and six wooden steps before peering around a trellis privacy wall.  

In other words, the culprit had to work for their booty.  So why on earth did they leave the oh-so-useful extension cord?  

I’m not much of a gardener.  I transfer succulents to larger pots once a year whether they need it or not. I used to have a lime tree but it died after bearing fruit twice. I spiked the dirt around its dead trunk with cactus cuttings and those have done quite well.  I don’t really need three trowels, two hand-rakes, or a seed planter.  But the snippers?  Those I used all the time to trim my Japanese maple and take cuttings from the aloe or the jade plant.  I sorely miss those.

I almost never lock my car when I’m home.  Truth told, I leave the front door unlatched at night, just in case I need to call for help, though so far, I never have.  There’s a key hidden on the property, the location of which ten or twenty people know.   But none of that makes a difference here.  Bottom line:  If whoever took my tools had told me of their desperate need, I would have handed them over without hesitation.  

Eventually, I will surrender to their absence and buy a few replacements.  The park manager said she’d make discreet inquiries but I would rather not know who has my things.  Instead I’ve chosen to pretend that garden gremlins snagged them to use on a charitable project where they plant lavender in the yards of unsuspecting over-worked single mothers.  The bushes will bloom all of a sudden one day.  Children will rush outside to bury their faces in the fragrant flowers.  From beneath the lower branches, ephemeral creatures will titter and smile, hiding my trowels behind their backs.  Miles away, I will sit on my porch and dream of white coral bells waiting for the fairies to sing,  I will close my eyes and smile with infinite contentment, as the Delta breezes ruffle the tender leaves on the pin oak over head.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I hovered between giddy and nauseous today.  I don’t have any relatives in Iran, Jerusalem, or Dubai as far as I know.  None of my nephews or nieces serve in the American armed forces.  But I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. The agony of the parents of dozens of girls murdered in that first ugly strike sickens me.

I stand in the southeast corner of Andrus Island, in rural Sacramento County, California, in the United States of America.  I lean out of my car window and gaze eastward at the moon rising as the golden globe slips to the horizon in the rear view mirror.   A bird lands on the wire near a pole which warns of danger.

My day held moments of incomparable human interaction.  From the gift of home-made marshmallows to the Iranian woman who left a note in Farsi on the shop’s Gratitude Wall, I spent the day bouncing from joy to joy.  Yet my mind kept returning to the horror, to the images, to the feeds from Israel, Tehran, and Tel Aviv.  Push has come to shove.  I can no longer pretend that none of it touches me. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, my glib response to an inquiry after my health has been to quip, No bombs falling on my village.  I had a tangential connection to that war through a friend in Kansas City.  She sold some of her photographs of Kyiv to raise money for her brothers who served in the Ukrainian Army.  My dollars contributed to the purchase of boots and a night scope.  Her images hang in the waiting room of the California law firm in which I work.

But I do not know anyone involved in the new war into which our government has thrust the reluctant world.  Until the lady asked if she could write on our Gratitude Wall in her native language, it had been years since I conversed with anyone whom I knew came from Iran.  My son had a classmate whose father was Persian.  He spoke in his native language at times, though he worked as a civil engineer in the city where we lived.  Otherwise, I know many people from Lebanon and a few from Israel.  My mother’s paternal family came from Syria.  But my name comes from my father’s grandmother and I have clear blue eyes.

As I tarried beneath the moon, strains of an old song drifted through my mind.  Hmm mmm mmm. . . something about being under the same moon although we are far apart.  Its tune and lyrics elude me, but the idea grips me and not in the romantic way that the song intended.  Somewhere on the other side of the world, a frantic mother stands under this same gleaming orb, desperate for news of her child whom she will never again embrace.  I cannot bear the vicarious stab of her inconsolable grief.  I cast my eyes downward, start the car, and finish my drive. 

In front of my tiny house, I sit for a few minutes, gazing at the bakery box with the last of the marshmallows after a day of sharing.  When I lift it from the car seat, a sprinkle of powder sugar drifts through the air.  Suddenly I find myself sobbing as I dust the flakes to the ground.  All those children who will never taste the deliciousness of handspun confections!  I think of my own son, whose absolute rejection of everything about war and the military brooks neither equivocation or dissent.  It is time to take sides.  If neutrality ever lingered as an option, no such luxury persists.  You are for peace, or you are for war.  You cannot straddle this fence.

I shifted the car into park and turned off the engine.  In the silence of the evening, I said a prayer to whatever deity might exist, asking comfort for the mothers and the fathers,  the sisters, and the brothers; but most of all, for the broken bodies and sweet souls of the little children who went to school one day and did not return.

Then I went into the house and closed the door.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Han Bee’s marshmallows

Moon-gazing bird

Gibbous moon rising

For those who wonder:

  I did not look at the lady’s note.  I could not bear to do so.  I should have asked her what it said but I did not think of it.  She purchased a fused glass pocket heart.  As I wrapped it for her, I asked from where she came.  She said, very quietly, “I am from Iran, but I live in Sacramento now.”  I asked if her people at home were safe.  She held my eyes and whispered, “So far.”  I am not a religious person, but I instinctively pressed my hands together and bowed my head.  “May it remain so,” I heard myself say.  She replied, simply, “Thank you.”