The sound of the ocean has been a lullaby for me since I first came to California in 2015. I had lived on the Atlantic years before that, and had found her to be cold and unforgiving. Born and raised in St. Louis, migrating to Kansas City, and even spending a year in Jasper, Arkansas, I feel comfortable beside a river. I waded in the Meramec once, waist deep and laughing, clinging to my brother Mark’s hand and protesting all the way.

Only driving down the Coastal Highway that first time did I find solace, a strange combination of giddiness and longing. A friend had urged me to visit Pigeon Point; I’ve told this story many times. It did not disappoint me, and I repeatedly returned in those first two years of quarterly visits to Stanford. Once I moved here, in the late days of 2017, I started spending as much time as possible out this way. I had intended to live north of the Bay, but fate had other plans for me and I found myself on the banks of yet another river, with only the occasional weekend beside the sea.

On my arrival last night, I felt the old juice flow through my veins. Here was the hostel scene that had cradled me during my early days of trying to fit into the western world. I had stayed at Montara several times, and though I had never found it as homey as Pigeon Point, in truth it always seemed to be more well run. It still is; but everything evolves. The Covid years worked their ways with this place, too; and it is not as I remember.

The big building with its twin expanses of guest room flanking a welcoming central office has been split into two separate wings by erecting a make-shift wall. The employee area has been relocated to where I remember yoga classes being held. A gate stretches across the upper entrance, with a keypad on the right where a person with mobility impairments cannot hope to reach it. I’ve had to summon help both times I’ve come to the property, on arrival and late this afternoon.

I, too, have changed. I went walking on Gregorio Beach this morning, and now my back spasms in protest. Rather than sit on the point and watch the sun set as I did last night, or writing at the kitchen table, my emergency stash of Tylenol and I huddle near the window adjacent to my bed. I had the women’s common sleeping quarters to myself last night, but tonight a couple of women have checked into the hostel and stashed their belongings on bunks near mine. I don’t mind that; but in visits past, I would be out in the kitchen talking to my fellow travelers. Tonight I can but rest, and ponder the wisdom of hauling a duffel, a soft-side cooler, and my laptop bag for this short sojourn.

Today I had planned to lunch at Half-Moon Bay Brewery, where I have had many a lovely meal. I made scrambled eggs for myself at 7, before heading to the seaside for my long-awaited stroll. I planned to have a sandwich and something salty to go with it, fixed in their slightly pretentious but quite tasty style. By the time I got to La Granada and the restaurant, pain gripped me. I knew that I couldn’t even walk from the parking lot to the outdoor seating. My head fell to the steering wheel. Tears welled in my eyes.

A few yards down the road, I found myself thinking, I just need somewhere I can park right by the door. Suddenly it appeared: A funny sort of pub, Old Princeton Landing, almost a sports bar, with a wide outdoor area filled with college students. Right there, beside them, a handicapped parking spot into which I pulled without signaling to the dismay of the car behind me.

I had few hopes for the place but a cheerful young man sprang from behind the counter and held the door for me. He assured me that he would take my order table-side even though they had counter-service. I scanned the menu with trepidation, finally ordering Eggs Benedict without ham. Surely a place with concrete floors and neon beer signs would make a mess of this dish, I told myself. But the only other choices were fish tacos, burgers, or chili.

Imagine my astonishment at the lovely plate of food he brought! Perfectly poached eggs, a tangy Hollandaise, and potatoes with a crisp exterior and soft, billowy centers. I didn’t even mind the wretched coffee, as I broke the yoke and watched it seep into the English muffin that I figured I could risk, having not had any gluten for weeks. I enjoyed every bite.

Afterward, I drove to Pacifica, hoping to browse in my favorite antique store. Again, though, the spasms in my back intervened. Instead I parked alongside the railing adjacent to the pier and watched the waves through the railing. People strolled by my car, many holding fishing poles. I closed my eyes and remembered my time along the pier, a few years ago, right as lockdown lifted in early 2021. Standing at the end of the long expanse, music blasting around me, children darting in and out among their silent parents. Life on the pier. I brushed away the memory and watched the far horizon, where a cargo ship made its slow way to San Francisco.

When I got back to the hostel, I tried to open the gate without calling for help but in the end, I couldn’t make it back to the car before the even the slow metal barrier clanged shut. I drove down the hill to the handicapped parking spot, and inched into the side door of the dorm. A short nap helped, but I won’t be running races any time soon.

Now I listen to the song of the sea as the ladies sharing this room unpack and settle. The waves rise and fall on the rocks beneath the point. Clouds covered the sunset, so I didn’t miss anything after all. A chill has settled with the gathering dark. I hope that I will be able to sleep this night for every fiber of my being cries for reprieve. I return to the Delta tomorrow; to my tiny house nestled in a row of other tiny houses, on the banks of the San Joaquin, far away from my beloved Pacific. As my body strains to relax against the metal headboard, I wonder whether Thomas Wolfe might have been right after all.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Every journey has a moment when getting there ceases to be the point and the destination becomes paramount. For me, on the increasingly rare weekend when I can escape my every day life, that moment occurs when I crest a hill or take a turn in the highway and my Pacific lies before me.

This weekend afforded me such a time. A couple of gracious creatives who belong to the collective in which I typically toil for the three days after my work-week agreed to staff the shop. I loaded more food than I can eat in sixty hours in my nearly cleared back seat, along with my laptop, the latest copy of The Atlantic, and a weird mystery novel that I found in a thrift store when I went for my fourth or fifth attempt to get properly made glasses at UC Berkeley on Wednesday. I wouldn’t cross the picket line at Urban Ore, so I made my way inland and stopped at Habitat Restore, where I got a sweet little chair for fourteen bucks and this book for half off of a dollar. I felt smug and looked heavenward to see if Jimmy approved as the nice man at the loading dock tucked the chair into my RAV4.

This morning, after getting coffee at my favorite place, the Isleton Coffee Company, and checking with Ruthie at Mubdie’s, I headed west. I stopped for water and scrolled through Substack until I found The Bulwark‘s Secret Podcast. Jonathan V. Last and Bill Kristol, the latter substituting for Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, analyzed the authoritarian tendencies of the current administration for an hour as I made my way to the Bay. I might have missed it, but JVL seemed to forget to say, Rebecca, take us out, before the strains of the signature song flooded my vehicle. It’s Friday, Friday. . .

I’m usually at home when I watch the Secret pod (so named because only paid subscribers get access to the full broadcast). The frolicking melody fills my tiny house. But the car fairly rocks as the song swells. Just as the dancing teens hit the wild crescendo, I slip onto the Coastal Highway and the sea comes into view. The moment arrives. The destination supersedes the journey as the pivotal focus. My soul stirs.

I glide south, through Pacifica, stopping for another coffee at Soul Grind, a place that I discovered last year and quite enjoy. With an Americano and a piece of gluten-free almond cake that looks possibly house-made and has what I believe you might call a tender crumb, I sat at a table by two women and an exceedingly excitable girl of six or seven. I cannot see the ocean but I hear the call through the large, open folding doors. A few minutes before I got to the cafe, I had leaned on the hood of my car in front of Rockaway Beach. Ten foot waves crashed as high as the rail. A young man standing beside me laughed as he filmed the swell. Our eyes met. We could have been anyone — virtual strangers, yes; but also mother and son, two friends, a couple of co-workers. It’s amazing, he exclaimed. I had to agree.

At 3:00 o’clock, I presented myself at the gate to Montara, the hostel at which I had booked a bed for two nights. I wanted one of the singles, but the women’s shared room has no one else tonight and I can probably handle one night in the company of traveling students tomorrow, if any come. I dragged my food into the building and stashed it with my name affixed, just as I had done many times in the carefree years. A few things have changed, but the smell of salt still clings to the air and the old wooden fences still groan beneath the weight of the ages.

I raise the window beside the table so I can hear the voice of the Pacific reminding me of her unending presence. Other visitors wander into the room, checking cupboards, assessing available cookware, talking about supper. Wave after wave lifts and slams against the craggy shoreline. I breathe — in, out, in, out. I close my eyes. I have come home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

On Saturday, 16 March 2025, the mail brought two indicia of identity: My 42nd Missouri Bar card, and a letter from the Internal Revenue Service advising me of income reported under my name and Social Security number in 2017 from a company for which I have never worked and of which I have never heard.

My loss of identity began late that year, as I wound down my law practice and began to surrender myself to a sort of limbo in which the person whom I had been since 1983 yielded to the person into whom I tried to mold myself. I sold the home I had owned for 25 years, stopped taking new clients, yielded the office which I had occupied since 2010, and headed west to a state which would tolerate but never understand my pronunciation of certain revealing words. When the winter rain broke the five-year drought in my adopted home state a few weeks later, I put away my signature Corley Law Firm ice scraper and my long coat. The woman into whom I had morphed would not need them again.

For a couple of years, I took inactive status from the Missouri Bar. I still paid dues, albeit a lower sum. I got the card but no longer had to meet the CLE requirement. I went about my days in my new guise as a nonprofessional, sitting back and letting the California lawyers for whom I did freelance work articulate legal concepts into the air around me as though I had just presented myself for a first-year lecture.

I sought refuge in the writing that had always sustained me, from my elementary days on the sidelines of volleyball games to the dark hours of a Scotch-soaked college dorm life. In my heart, I clung to the definition of “lawyer” (a person with a degree from law school), even though in that gap of time, I could not call myself an “attorney” (someone licensed to practice law). When my employer’s clients treated me in that dismissive way that people use for secretaries, the offhanded manner that secretaries certainly do not themselves deserve, I gritted my teeth. I reminded myself that my worth does not depend on their opinion of me. I quietly drafted their trusts, wills, and powers of attorney. I ghost-wrote letters, because, as Alan White once proclaimed, I do in fact give good letter.

But when I discovered that I could not even do volunteer work while classified as “inactive”, I pulled the plug on reactivation. My annual dues tripled and once again I had to take courses to maintain my prowess, with a few added requirements with which I had to accelerate familiarity but in no way resented. I was, and always would be, a proud member of the Missouri Bar. A lawyer. An attorney. A member of the profession that Shakespeare vowed to sacrifice first before all others.

This evening, I studied the letter explaining the tax fraud that seems to have occurred in my name. I penned a reply, providing the necessary information from which, I assume, the confusion will eventually be resolved. I did an internet search on the company where the false or mistaken reporting apparently occurred. For a dreamy few minutes, the life of an employee there appealed to me. What would I have done there? Would I have lived in a downtown loft, or out in the suburbs, riding the commuter train each morning? Would I have made friends or eaten lunch alone on a park bench in front of the building? What nightlife would await me, when I shut down my computer and sashayed onto the elevator at five o’clock?

Would I luxuriate in that existence? Or would I feel as much at sea in that life as I do in this? Neither fish nor fowl; sitting tucked into the corner of an actual file room, growing ever distant from the days when I confidently walked the marble corridors and carelessly swung open the courtroom doors.

I tucked my new bar card into my wallet and lifted my letter to the IRS from the printer. I remembered a time in my childhood when my mother accidently received several hundred extra dollars from a bank teller. Her hands shook when she counted the bills in the little envelope. Her eyes met mine and a stranger lurked behind them. Years later, I would write these words: Bills were paid in fantasy and full / but she returned the wrong she had been given / lamenting evermore what might have been.

I sealed the envelope on my imaginary existence, affixed a stamp, and tucked it into my small brown purse. Then I went about my evening’s preparations for the coming workday.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Years ago, I showed my book of poetry to a would-be lover, he himself a published wordsmith of the rhyming sort. He sat in a chair near the bay window in one of the Kansas City apartments in which I so ignobly misspent my youth. He disconsolately flipped pages. I gazed across the room, awaiting his decree. “They’re nice little homespun ditties,” he finally remarked.

I put the slim journal away and poured us each another glass of single malt. The conversation turned to other, less fraught pursuits, like where we would go to dinner and, quite frankly, his place or mine. I don’t remember the rest of the evening, overshadowed as it necessarily became with the embarrassed self-indulgence that drove me to offer my scribblings for his merciless perusal.

Years later, my estranged second husband sent me an email on reading something that I sent into the interwebs, one of these blithely tendered essays. I see you’ve found your voice, he noted. Well done, you.

I recently organized the rubble shoved beneath the bed in my lofted sleeping room. I found a handful of empty notebooks and one or two with carefully copied renditions of my hopeful poems. A familiar profile seen from a distance; / a cheek that I have touched. / A chin I have seen tremble. I turn the page. My soul is in my spinal cord. I know it’s there. / When I walk across the street, people stare. I let the volume drop to the oak table on which my printer rests. I lift another one, older, from my college days. What can I say to she who dried my tears, who spent too much time in crowded hospital rooms, and jails? I do not know / and so I talk of the silver markets / and over-sprouted beans. A decade later: The phone rings, and my sister says: Mary, it’s time to come home / and I know that she who once / so tenderly dried my tears / has gone home.

The verses proudly perch on the pages where I have penned them. Some bear dates; none come from this era, my essay era. I might have a few more somewhere, more recently authored. But most come from the decades when I still believed that I could only properly express myself in the lilting cadence of poetry. In that era, three or four of my poems got chosen for publication in a literary magazine. I can’t prove that; the journal folded years ago and I checked their archives without success. But I remember. I can even recite them, though I never do except silently, to remind myself that someone once thought my poetry had value.

I know a gifted photographer who strives to be a painter. The powerful images that this person captures with a lens haunt me; but still, they think only a canvas and brush produce genuine art. I understand. People like my essays; I won many a motion with my skillful legal composition. Like Niggle with his leaves, I hammer out a perfect sentence, stringing together a whole slew of them into an orderly package, and thus to the logical and satisfying end.

The fundamental flaw in this design lies with my personal satisfaction. A book takes so long; an essay overbears; a paragraph bogs one down in its internal structure. But oh, the poem! Lyrical, rhythmic, lilting. No extraneous words clutter its structure. If inside the heart of every goose there lurks a swan, my own breast holds the soul of a poet, longing to be free but never quite escaping the weight of its mournful and trundling pronouncements.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

In case you are interested, here are two poems of mine, published as a pair in circa 1978, in Eads Bridge, the literary journal of St. Louis University.

RED
knows limitless potential
for its rage is great
its enthusiasm
endless
its beauty renowned
while green is only
the cool air and
the chilled voice
that I use to send you home.

And what is blue,
but all that I have in me?
The rain we felt in April,
the wind,
all the poems that you read me.
Dresses that I wore to school
mirrors from which my image shone
a butterfly, trapped briefly then released
a child, once real then gone.
More, much more, too much to say
But there, and all in BLUE.

Both ©M. Corinne Corley, 1978, 2025. Like all my writings, and my photographs, these belong to me and are registered or in process of registration. Please do not reprint for any reason without permission. Thank you.

When I first built my tiny house, I had this idea that people would use my bed like a couch. I had a drop-loft installed to make an upstairs study, under which we placed a sleeping cubby. Large rolling drawers held my off-season clothing and any other storage items. With a small side table and a little chair, I felt the area could double as a parlor.

Not so. I learned that only children and gay couples felt comfortable sitting on my bed, even neatly made with many pillows along the back wall. While I know a lot of gay couples and a fair number of children, I wanted everyone to feel at ease. I also discovered that I craved a private space. So I sacrificed my writing loft and had a carpenter tear out the bed.

We undertook that project four years ago. Since then, I have struggled to find a good configuration for my new sitting room. One has to duck to clear the loft; but once inside and seated, people seemed to accept the space, except the accommodations. I tried a trio of love seats and a few different chairs, each slightly different and purchased secondhand. Their bulk and depth forced knees to touch mid-room no matter how I turned them. I kept experimenting, having chosen not to utilize the built-in benches common to most tiny houses. I wanted “real” furniture.

Along the way, I acquired new items to compliment what I already owned. With each experimental configuration, the table that came from home, the wooden child’s dresser made by my ex-husband’s first wife’s grandfather, and my angel shelves, all found various places. I rotated, shifted, dusted, decorated. I would stand on the perimeter, turning my head this way and that. I sat in each chair, and on the stools. At 5-2, I can get into the space without much trouble, but could a taller person? Would they feel claustrophobic?

Would I even get enough visitors, after seven years as a California resident, to make the effort meaningful?

Home means comfort to me, safety, peace, and quiet. If people do stop by, for a cup of tea or a glass of wine, I want these sensations to envelope them. Let us sit together, even if in silence. Let the ills of the world not bother us. Do not open the door to sorrow.

The sitting room began to coalesce when my friend Tim Anderson swapped a gold chair for an antique platform rocker that I quite liked but which took too much space. Then my second husband passed away, and left me the Amish table that he swore I married him to acquire. I brought a rocker from my porch to save it from the winter’s rain. A certain symbiosis shimmered in the little cave.

My friend Michelle hung the ex’s ex’s grandfather’s cabinet on the wall. I got a new laundry hamper that almost resembles a backrest. I found a lovely pillow in my guest sleeping loft and unfolded the spare wooden chair. Eventually, I would acquire a blue velvet cushion for the rocker; but even so, it seemed inviting.

As time goes by, I find myself more drawn to these serene vignettes. I leave the drama of a chaotic life behind me. I sit in Tim’s chair and spread my little brother’s afghan over my lap. Our Grandma Corley made one for each of us; I keep mine in the cedar chest. My feet rest on the footstool that once belonged to my great-grandmother whose name I bear. In this calm pose, I let myself drift to sleep.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

If you want to see one of my goofy videos, this one about how I assembled the sitting room, click here.