The bridges, old and new, hold themselves still enough for the clumsy fingers that yearn to record their majesty.  I fumble with my phone, having abandoned the little Canon several years ago.  Now and then, I get something worth keeping.

But the birds elude me.  The swans arch their necks and duck beneath the vines.  I glimpse a hawk atop a tall pole and slow, easing down  my window as noiselessly as possible.  Still it turns, drops a bead on my car, and spreads its wings.  I can only gaze in wonder as it cuts across the otherwise unbroken blue of the summer sky.  

A few feet later, an egret suns on a rock amid a pool of ripples in the slough.  It must be the tick of my timing belt that alerts it to my approach.  It, too, takes flight.  I pass without pause.

The bridges lift or swing every time I near them.  I pull to the side of the road or ease in line.  I can open the door for all that metal cares; I could stand in the highway.  I could holler at the thing to wait while I take a few more bursts.  It rises at the command of someone inside its little house and will not lower for the mere pleasure of thwarting me or to escape my glare.  I am of no consequence to the bridges, nor to the electronics which control them, nor to the navigational systems of the vessels to which they yield.

I am out in the world, but I am not of it.  Its creatures shy from me.  The human structures crouching within it do what they will without regard to my whims.  Thus do I pass each day, my shadow leaving no mark, my tears no stain, and the silent cry of my prayer fading even as the wind falls.

The leaves shimmy above my house.  I raise my face and let that air settle on my cheeks.  Many years fell on the cutting room floor while I hid within my unkempt dwelling.  Now I travel outside its confines but gingerly, wistfully.  I move in silence..  I stare as nature dances, as humanity builds, as the colors change and new life emerges.  I wait in noiseless anticipation, while the hawk soars and the river roars and the tug boat passes in the deep channel of the Sacramento River.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Dear friends:  It’s that time of year again, when I ask you to consider donating to Rose Brooks Center Inc. in honor of my birthday.  I’m running my annual Facebook Fundraiser or you can click HERE to donate directly on their site.  Thank you.  If you or anyone you know is struggling with family violence, please reach out for help.  In the KC area, call Rose Brooks at  816-861-6100.  Anywhere else in the country, please see THIS PAGE for a local referral or the National Domestic Violence Hotline.  You are not alone.  There is always a way.

As I sit down to the tired laptop, weak battery, dirty screen, the clock reads 9:31 p.m. PDST.  Simple math says that in St. Louis, the clocks read 11:31 p.m.. CDST.  As of this moment, I have lived for 41 years and 13 and a half hours without my mother.  I share that burden with my siblings, our children, and our cousins.  

Forty-one years without the throaty laugh, the rolled brown eyes, the low voice, the brown curls and the myriad wrap-around skirts in every imaginable fabric.  She made those skirts from a Simplicity pattern. After the first successful project, she went back to the fabric store and acquired enough yardage to make it again and again.  She wore them with crew-neck t-shirts, Keds tennis shoes, and red Maybelline lipstick.  If it was late enough in the evening, she would have shed her bra.  During the day, she’d be demurely covered and carrying a shoulder bag that she also created in multiple materials with her Singer sewing machine.

I do not sew except with needle and thread in very small runs.  But I still darn my leggings using the egg that I found in my mother’s sewing box when I brought it home to Kansas City after her funeral.  I snip the thread with my mother’s tiny silver sewing scissors.  A few years ago, I took a photo of those scissors and texted it to my three sisters without comment.  They all instantly knew what they were.  Sitting in the same chair that I now occupy, at the same fold-down live-edge cherry table, I literally laughed outloud.  The habits of creatures never desert them.

Last weekend I stood on a stepstool to reach the shelf on which I have one  of my mother’s pictures and a few other sentimental trinkets.  An angel from my mother-in-law; a pair of God’s-eyes that my son made in kindergarten; a bronze rose that his godmother purchased at the Ren fest for my son to give me; a red crystal vase that belonged to my grandmother Corley.  I carefully ran a feather duster across the wood surface and the contours of the precious objects.  I had to strain to see the photograph of my maternal unit, arms spread wide and dancing a little jig in our front yard.  I lowered myself back to terra-almost-firma, a 24 x 8 vinyl floor in my tiny house on wheels.  Tears formed in my eyes but I ignored them and kept dusting, and sweeping, and washing dishes.

In the decades since my mother slipped from us, I’ve done so many things that she might have helped me navigate with more grace.  I wed and divorced three times; I lost several pregnancies, including my son’s twin.  She wanted me to have a career and I tried, Mama, I truly tried.  She encouraged me to write and that I certainly have done.  Every kindness done by me can be traced to her example.  My political views stem from her.  She gave me the curls on my head, the brown spots starting to rise on my hands, and the wicked sense of humor that I never quite suppress.  

My son didn’t meet her.  Neither did any of my husbands.  Had they the privilege, something might have changed.  What I am, what I do, what I fear, what I strain to undertake, makes more sense as a tribute to my mother.  Every thrift store reminds me of the jaunts on which she took us to find treasures and the delicate objects that she used throughout our home — bowls, and pitchers, and candle-holders.  When I sit on the porch at dusk, when I drink coffee and watch the sun rise, when I take drives to small towns — I think of her.  

The clock turns to 10:00 p.m. so it is tomorrow in Missouri.  Another anniversary of our loss draws to a close.  I have made it through another year without her.  The sorrow still grips me, but not as intensely.  I have not learned to live without her, but I have found a path through the Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley shaped hole in the universe.

I have had a lot of names in my life, but for every day that I have breathed, I have been Lucille Corley’s baby girl.  There are people who’ve lost their mothers at younger ages; and people that feel just as keenly the terrible moment when they held the frail hand of a fading octogenarian.  I do not claim a monopoly on grief; nor do I insist on the right to remain raw and bleeding in the wake of her long-ago death.  But I miss her.  I owe my life to her.  I owe my strength to her.  I owe my resilience to her.  I do not doubt that I also have her to thank for some of my insecurities, but I take sole responsibility for their stubborn persistence.  She taught me better.  She said, and meant, that although what can’t be cured can be endured, most things can, in fact, be overcome.

Rest in peace, Hot Lips Mama.  Your boy has come home to you; and I know that you fell into each other’s arms, and walked together to the banks of the river, where you now sit with both your sons, at peace, perhaps, for an eternity.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley

Me and my mother

My entire life has revolved around and been driven by lists.

Lists provide a sense of security in anxious moments and a drive in moments of exhilaration.  I can reduce anything to a chart of steps.  From time to time, I dabble in the asterisk, but a solid flow of enumerated bites sets the rhythm and sends me forward.  

I make mental lists but usually grab one of the scores of notebooks shoved in drawers and baskets, turn to an unblemished page, and uncap my favorite pen (at least, until I gave it to my son; now I settle for anything at hand).  If I get two or three lines down and think of another first logical move, I have no qualms about adding at the top, in the band of page crowning the wide-rule blue lines.  

I make Lists of Things to Pack, Christmas Card Lists, Grocery Lists, and Lists of Bad Habits to Break.  But my true calling lies in the To-Do List.

I carefully pen every step.  Beside each task, I draw a small box.  Some folks like to cross through anything they’ve finished.  I prefer the solid check, inserted with a flourish accompanied by a satisfied grin.  I’m not above adding an entry long after I’ve completed an interim step, just to make that tick which lets me know that I can move to any items that still sport empty boxes.  I like the jolt of satisfaction and the eagerness which follows, both of which I willingly relinquish for the heady sense of empowerment when I place a mark beside the last item and set the pencil beside the notepad.

In a dark period of my life, when I did not expect to survive, I broke my day into fifteen minute increments.  I made a list of everything that I would require myself to do in each fifteen-minute block.  I allowed myself to rest at the end of every segment.  After a few weeks, still breathing, shaky but sentient, I increased the period to 30 minutes by bracketing the to-do list for each of its halves.  Eventually, I could manage an eight-hour list and merge smaller tasks (“open tube of tooth paste, apply paste to brush, open mouth. . . .” became “brush teeth”).  I made it through what seemed an eternity by lengthening my lists and increasing both the abstractness and the complexity of each item of required activity.  Professional help might have hastened the process, but at that time, most of the better therapists served as my expert witnesses.  I could not bear to admit my frailty to someone whose testimony I would be having to prepare.  I used lists instead.  Somehow, I survived anyway.

Occasionally I amuse myself by creating lists of list titles in the way my friend Alan used to make a game out of drafting titles to songs he never wrote.  

• Things To Take On The Train If You Have a Long Way to Travel and Don’t Want to Make Any Friends
• Things Your Mother Actually Told You, Not The Ones You Claim She Did.
• Books You Want to Tell Everyone Are On Your TBR
• One-Line Insults to Bite Back Your Tongue Before Saying
• Places To Hide Your Stash of Loose  Diamonds If You Ever Get Any

On Friday, I found myself having to consider whether I could haul three tables out of a bathtub to access seven large original paintings that a deceased artist’s daughter would be coming to retrieve.   I thrust my walking stick aside, pushed back the door of the unused shower, and stared in dismay at the impossibility of the task.

I had never asked anyone to push three heavy tables against the artwork, which someone else had put in the tub at my direction.  Lifting the tables would pose a threat to my stability, especially given the rigid metal frame of the door opening.  Water and rust had gathered near the faucet, so I couldn’t slide the paintings over even if I could safely navigate them past a 5-gallon jug of water and three mops which I thought I had thrown out but which someone seems to have rescued.

Eventually, unwilling to admit defeat, I stood on the toilet, wedged my arthritic hip against the back wall, and locked my knees (the broken artificial right one and the bone-on-bone left one).  I slowly inched the canvases over the tables, through the gap above the shower door, and into the vicinity of the automatic accessible sink.  Every motion activated the hands-free faucet, which in turn jolted my annoyingly alert startle reflex.  As I worked, my oddest list title yet popped into my head.

Things They Forgot To Tell You About Being Single at Seventy.

I know what I would put on that particular list, but I will keep it to myself.  Too grim.  Tinged with bitterness.  Not cheerful.

Eventually, I got all of the paintings rescued and dragged to a table beside the stack of prints by the same fellow.  I dusted the edges, grouped them by size, and turned away.  I stopped, though, to gaze again at a particularly sweet watercolor of a hermit’s hut near the Georgiana Slough.  I thought about the man who had painted them during a reclusive period in his life, his family far away, separated from his wife and daughter.  He seemed to be doggedly forging an unknown but exciting path, bringing me picture after picture to add to his wall in our shop.  But then, unexpectedly, he died, younger than I am now, and, seemingly, more healthy.  I think he still had a fairly extensive to-do list, starting with finding his true north.

I left the light burning in the backroom so that his daughter would see the paintings on the table when she arrived even if I was busy with a customer.  I moved back through the suite, mentally reciting my morning chores, even though I knew the lot by rote.  

Mugwumpishhy tendered.

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Mubdie’s QOTD – 08/02/2026

My TBS on the shelf above the cedar chest.