I take Twitchell Island Road to work now because I’ve seen or heard about too many fatalities at the intersection of Jackson Slough Road and Highway 12.  The frequent occurrence reminds me that when I first moved here, I came upon a fatality that had just happened a few minutes before my car reached the intersection.  Tired fire fighters stood protectively over a prone human.  Someone gestured me around the debris.  I drove across the highway with a sick feeling.

In eight years, I’ve seen or heard of probably a dozen deaths at the same spot, possibly more.  I remember an intersection in Kansas City like that, not far from many of the places that I lived or work in my thirty years there.  Some of these road designs invite folly.  But I can avoid it, so now I do.

You reach Twitchell Island Road by turning left over the Owl Harbor bridge at the spot where my road becomes private.  A lazy right turn puts you on one of the most broken surfaces in a county of badly tended streets.  But I don’t mind.  My RAV4 navigates it well and I have new shocks so my body doesn’t feel it much.

Twitchell Island spans to your left as you drive alongside the tangle of hyacinth below the levee.  Water fowl rise from the slough’s surface as the car passes.   I hover between stands of overgrown trees and gaze at them.  A pair of swans; egrets roosting some distance from each other; a heron on the far side, alone in the eddies.

Yesterday I got a clear look at a hawk.  My phone’s camera can’t get a money shot but I did what I could.  I felt its gaze.  The hum of my engine made no difference to it, from its perch overhead.  We sat and stared at one another, a pane of glass and decades of evolution marking the impassable distance between us.  I felt old.  Every ache in my bones sneered; every torn muscle and dry joint made themselves known.  Still I sat, my car idling, the hawk gazing down at me without concern.  

There must be hawks in Missouri but I have no memory of them.  Here they treat the humans as inept interlopers.  They land on our highwires, fluffing their feathers with the edges of the warning signs.  While I navigate the pocked levee at the slowest of speeds, the hawk swoops from the tree and cuts across the sky over the harvested pasture filled with sheep standing head down to the newly mown surface.  I’m left to continue my journey, to the job I must work, and the hours I must toil, and the noise of a small inconsequential town where I must ply my trade.  The hawk pays me no mind.  It has already reached heaven and will soon find another tree from which to gaze on the vibrant expanse of its domain.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Photo  © M. Corinne Corley 2026

The calendar announces that I have been living in a tiny house in Northern California for eight years and two months, if you count my first year when I spent two weeks out of every six  in Kansas City, which I do.  I registered to vote in 2018.  I changed my car registration in 2019 when I no longer had an address to use back home, but only because it was about to expire anyway.

That Missouri plate got me out of a few scrapes during those early months.  An ominous figure lumbered at me from a white pick-up while I photographed a field of turbines.  He demanded to know my business on the private property. I gestured to the RAV4.  I’m from out of town, I asserted.  I’ve never seen windmills like this, and I’ve never seen so many.  He studied me for a long moment before pointing towards the road.  Best get now, though, he said.  We can’t be too careful.  Indeed.  At least he didn’t pull the rifle that I saw through his truck’s back window.

I find myself surrounded with these sensational vistas.  When I drove over Vasco Road to Palo Alto, I cut through rolling hills with row upon row of these tall majestic machines.  When I get to the coast, I gawk at surfers in January, sea lions in March, and hang-gliders in June.  So much space exists here, wide swaths of it, hundreds of miles of rolling hills and two lane highways.   I’ve seen huge rocks just off the coastline on which thousands of sea gulls roost.  I crane my neck to watch majestic formations of cranes cut through the morning sky.

But nothing mesmerizes me like the ships at sea.  I have a thousand stills and an equal number of short video clips of the great vessels making their way through the deep channel parallel with our levee road.  I want to know where they will dock, what they carry, and the names of the sailors who sleep in the berths at night.  I long for a clear sight of the flags under which they sail.  I squint to read their names and then want to know their history.  Most of all, though, I yearn to board one.  I want to walk its slippery surface, touch the metal contours, and feel the hum of the engines as it lumbers eastward, to Stockton, or west to the open sea.

I long to look towards the shore, and find the eye of a lens taking my picture, as I stand on the deck, balanced, sure, and steady.

My mother told me once that as long as I breathed, there remained a lifetime of possibility.  Since I’ve promised to live to be one-hundred and three, I have time.  One day, I will be on that ship, with the wind rippling through my hair and the, salty kiss of the sea caressing my face.  I’m still here.  It can still happen.  Stay tuned.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Photo and video taken from Brannan Island Road, on the California Delta Loop, 09 April 2026

Both © M. Corinne Corley 2026

It is hard to know what to keep and what to throw away when you downsize from 1400 square feet to merely two hundred.  

For many people, a house which is two and a half bedrooms with one and a half bathrooms and a partially finished basement seems small.  To me, the home in which I raised my son felt like a cozy palace.  We had enough room, most years, though I went through two marriages and two divorces in that time, so several years saw us consolidating closets to make room for step-fathers and the belongings that came with them.  

When everyone had left, and I walked the old floorboards alone, I marveled at the clutter which remained.  A mixture of my life and my son’s childhood filled every shelf and drawer.  As the time to sell neared, I panicked and started throwing things into garbage bags to haul to the curb.  Every person that volunteered a few hours of help left with a gift.  I got rid of rocking chairs and televisions that way.  I gave my son’s globe to the electrician’s child, which I later came to regret.  Boxes of books went to the public library’s fundraising sale.  I can admit, with the distance created by the intervening years, that my old secretary might still have a box of trinkets in her basement that I asked her to hold for me.

Here in California, small cubbies hold sundry mementos with which I cannot yet bear to part.  I touch them with a tender hand from time to time.  Tonight, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I pulled on the brass knob of a tiny drawer and extracted a small plastic egg from its back recesses.  I ran my finger along the red lines of design which my little boy so carefully applied.  

I do not celebrate this holiday in its religious sense.  I have not for many years.  Now that I have been living alone more than two thousand miles from family, I won’t have freshly baked reindling and rich schmarren.  In fact, I will be working all day, in the small shop that I founded in the town which lends its name to my rural address.

Children might wander into the place.  They will read books and play with the toys in our small kids’ zone while their parents study the art on our walls.  Most of the adults will wear finery and mention having had brunch at the Ryde hotel.  They will ask to set their coffees on my counter while they consider the sterling silver earrings, and I will answer that they certainly may.  Several will make purchases.  I will photograph them, smiling, holding framed prints or new cotton hats with their children clinging to their skirts and the hems of their jackets.

At five o’clock, I will take in the signs and shut off the lights.  I will drive my old car between the vineyards over the levee roads to my tiny house, with its crowded shelves and the ghosts lingering on the dusty sills.  No one will have given me flowers.  My son most likely will have called, and maybe my sister.  Before I finish the day, I will water the cactus on my porch and take the kitchen trash to the dumpster.  I will give the little egg one last glance before slipping it back into the drawer, where I expect it will stay for another year.

As the sun sets, I will gaze into the eyes of my little boy, eternally studying me from a faded photograph, taken on Easter, in Kansas City, when he was very young.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Chris Taggart (top) and Patrick Corley