The year has turned and marched two months ahead before I remembered to celebrate the seventh anniversary of my move to California. Now the snow geese settle by the hundreds on the fallow ground of Andrus Island with their less splendid cousins, the Canadian honkers, in smaller but just as noisy clusters. Egrets raise their long legs to scale the torn ground behind a mechanized tiller making its way across the field.

For the last four days, I have been camped in a cabin on the grounds of Park Delta Bay. A wasp infestation and a failed hot water heater drove me from Angel’s Haven. I have been given leave to stay in this park model for the week. With a small bundle of clothing and a week’s worth of groceries, I settled into the very cabin in which my son spent most of last September. His spirit surrounds me.

Recently I found myself in an absurd dialogue with a stranger on social media. They complained about some annoyance associated with what they called ‘woke ideology’. They argued that they did not expect to be paying taxes so other people could get out of supporting themselves. I stared at their words, wondering how the world got so small and mean. We used to care for each other. We used to drop coins in charity boxes on the counter at our local drug stores and write checks for foundations that research children’s diseases. I’ve lived in communities that routinely came out to fill bags with sand in case of flood. where families baked pies to auction for families whose houses had burned.

I saw an ad once with a little girl in a pink tutu raising her arms with one leg extended. The caption admonished, Nobody says, ‘I want to be a drug addict when I grow up.’ My mother taught us to do what we could to help others. As a sophomore in high school, I went down to southern Missouri with a youth group and got arrested for taking my black hosts into a segregated diner. We picketed the parish convent for punishing my brothers who had long hair. Our Ford Maverick sported a home-made bumper sticker protesting the Vietnam war. Years later, my son served Thanksgiving dinner at shelters and helped our friend Katrina package and deliver Meals on Wheels.

That’s what I learned and how I lived. So the generosity of park management in giving me safe harbor for this difficult week did not surprise me. Still, I find myself driving the levee roads, watching the swans in Brothers’ Island Slough, suddenly overcome with a strange mixture of regret and gratitude. I ask myself how I got to be this old with seemingly little to show for my decades of effort. Yet one thing I do possess: A veritable posse of people who care for me.

My evenings do not hold social obligations though, and I sit on my porch alone, watching people stroll by in pairs or led by their beloved canine friends. I watch the sunset by myself, though its beauty seems undiminished by my solitary situation. My life’s to-do list gathers dust on a shelf somewhere. Countries that I longed to see still elude my gaze. Poems linger unwritten in my mind’s recess. Yet, like Jenny’s wistful admirer, I know that life has thrown me a penny or two. So, as my Nana beseeched me to always remember, I keep putting my best foot forward, raising my eyes to the horizon, willing the flock of geese to pass overhead as I linger in the evening’s air.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Jenny Kissed Me, by Leigh Hunt