I turned 70 last week, and as though to honor my age, the evenings grow cool. I sit on my porch with coffee in the morning and need a sweater; over a glass of cold water or wine in the evening, I throw a shawl around my shoulders. The sun still warms the daytime air, but as darkness gathers, we open our windows for the freshness of the .moonlit air.

In a month, my seven-year anniversary as the backdesk of a California estate planning firm dawns. A month after that, I celebrate eight years to the day that my house arrived in the California Delta. On the heels of that November date crowds the anniversary of my own arrival in late December of 2017. Though it would be another twelve months before my habitation turned permanent and full-time, I will mark those eight years over a tiny Christmas tree in the Delta winds.

My emotions vary as I contemplate my metamorphosis into a California dreamer. I like the weather and the progressive politics although my little pocket here leans Libertarian. Knowing that if I get a day off, I can drive to the ocean comforts me. I do not miss the sweltering heat of a Midwestern summer, with its disregard for the turn of a calendar’s page. But posts on social media remind me of First Fridays in the Kansas City art district. I linger over the photographs before reminding myself of the richness of the art collective that we created in the small town near my rural community. Resourcefulness might not be my middle name but we claim distant cousinhood.

A recent reorganization of my tiny bedroom gave me a chance to declutter anew. Inspired by the gift of an antique chest, the project took two of us to orchestrate and three weeks to complete. In searching the boxes that had been stored for my entire tenure here, I gasped time and time again at new discoveries. One entire box held publications from my early writing life — magazines and newspaper articles in which my by-line testified to my early aspirations. I understand how the detour occurred. I push regret away. Yet still: Finding an entire manuscript of a novel that I wrote more than twenty years ago thrilled me. It had been stowed in a box under a yellowing copy of a magazine in which my first, and only, published poems appeared.

As summer draws to its inevitable end, I also muddled through the day that would have been my mother’s 99th birthday. Someone asked me how she died. I gave my usual answer: Medical malpractice. The questioner did not probe further. If she had, I would have explained that my mother presented with symptoms that turned out to be uterine cancer. Her doctor prescribed hormones, treating her with the disdain that medicine reserves for post-menopausal women. Even in the day, even forty years ago, the state of medical arts included the certain knowledge that pharmaceutical estrogen caused uterine cancer to metasticize. Whereas ninety-percent of women with such cancers could survive, my mother died within eleven months. She did not see her fifty-ninth birthday, or my thirtieth. I honored us both with a party to raise money for the local public library and could not have been more proud.

Summer’s wane triggers my customary nostalgia tinged with mild melancholy. I miss my son, my sister, and my friends. I miss my hundred-year-old bungalow. I long for autumn leaves and bonfires in black trash barrels at the end of cul-de-sacs following Dumpster Day in the neighborhood. From time to time, I wonder if I miss a life that never existed. Then I crack open another stored box and photographs spill on the floor. I kneel down and lift one after the other. My eyes grow misty. That world did exist, and I did matriculate along its splendid contours. When someone asks me why I left, I typically dismiss the question with a shrug. It’s a long story, I tell them. It would take a lot of alcohol to navigate the whole account. We leave it.

In my tiny bedroom, just before sleep, after I turn out the light and silence the phone, I ponder my life’s journey. From the first essay for which I received $5.00 to expound upon “God as An It” to the publication of my essay collection in 2022, I have always and ever been a writer. I’ve been a daughter, a lawyer, a wife, and a mother to greater or lesser success. My tendency to record my thoughts never stopped. Where some struggle to string ten words into a sentence and ten sentences into a paragraph, I bargain with myself to staunch the flow long enough to tend life’s obligations. Possibly those other roles suffered for my unrelenting focus on the printed page. If so, I hope I have now acquitted myself with sufficient glory to qualify for redemption.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Summer’s End, by John Prine (whose death stands as one of the greatest losses of the early pandemic)