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

I’ve lived full-time at Park Delta Bay RV & Tiny House Resort since 2018 and in all that time, I had not had any property stolen from my lot until now.

It took me a few days to decide that my gardening tools had gone missing.  I hired a young man to clean my porch and my friend Michelle randomly happens by from time to time.  Therefore when I first noticed that the tools had been moved from the chair on which I had set them, I had to reach out to James and Michelle before assuming a nefarious occurrence.  Neither had put them anywhere else.

Strangely, nothing else disappeared, including a 100-foot extension cord on a heavy-duty wheel.  I set the tools on the topmost chair in a stack of four, placed there so James could wash the old wood carrier that I use for a gardening caddy.   I had seven implements: Three trowels, two hand-rakes, one of those skinny things that you use to plant seeds, and an excellent pair of Fiskar snippers.  Other than the snippers, they had mostly come from Target and cost under ten bucks each.  But those Fiskars had set me back a penny or two, and I had taken good care of them.

After checking with James and Michelle, I posted on our residents’ Facebook Group.  I phrased my query as though I assumed someone just borrowed the seven tools.   It almost had to be someone who lives in the park.  We sit below the levee so anyone jogging by wouldn’t notice a particular lot’s accoutrements.  My porch can’t easily be seen even from the interior gravel road that circles around the western side of the community.  One must traverse the parking space, the flagstone walk, and six wooden steps before peering around a trellis privacy wall.  

In other words, the culprit had to work for their booty.  So why on earth did they leave the oh-so-useful extension cord?  

I’m not much of a gardener.  I transfer succulents to larger pots once a year whether they need it or not. I used to have a lime tree but it died after bearing fruit twice. I spiked the dirt around its dead trunk with cactus cuttings and those have done quite well.  I don’t really need three trowels, two hand-rakes, or a seed planter.  But the snippers?  Those I used all the time to trim my Japanese maple and take cuttings from the aloe or the jade plant.  I sorely miss those.

I almost never lock my car when I’m home.  Truth told, I leave the front door unlatched at night, just in case I need to call for help, though so far, I never have.  There’s a key hidden on the property, the location of which ten or twenty people know.   But none of that makes a difference here.  Bottom line:  If whoever took my tools had told me of their desperate need, I would have handed them over without hesitation.  

Eventually, I will surrender to their absence and buy a few replacements.  The park manager said she’d make discreet inquiries but I would rather not know who has my things.  Instead I’ve chosen to pretend that garden gremlins snagged them to use on a charitable project where they plant lavender in the yards of unsuspecting over-worked single mothers.  The bushes will bloom all of a sudden one day.  Children will rush outside to bury their faces in the fragrant flowers.  From beneath the lower branches, ephemeral creatures will titter and smile, hiding my trowels behind their backs.  Miles away, I will sit on my porch and dream of white coral bells waiting for the fairies to sing,  I will close my eyes and smile with infinite contentment, as the Delta breezes ruffle the tender leaves on the pin oak over head.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I hovered between giddy and nauseous today.  I don’t have any relatives in Iran, Jerusalem, or Dubai as far as I know.  None of my nephews or nieces serve in the American armed forces.  But I am a mother, a sister, a daughter, a friend. The agony of the parents of dozens of girls murdered in that first ugly strike sickens me.

I stand in the southeast corner of Andrus Island, in rural Sacramento County, California, in the United States of America.  I lean out of my car window and gaze eastward at the moon rising as the golden globe slips to the horizon in the rear view mirror.   A bird lands on the wire near a pole which warns of danger.

My day held moments of incomparable human interaction.  From the gift of home-made marshmallows to the Iranian woman who left a note in Farsi on the shop’s Gratitude Wall, I spent the day bouncing from joy to joy.  Yet my mind kept returning to the horror, to the images, to the feeds from Israel, Tehran, and Tel Aviv.  Push has come to shove.  I can no longer pretend that none of it touches me. 

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, my glib response to an inquiry after my health has been to quip, No bombs falling on my village.  I had a tangential connection to that war through a friend in Kansas City.  She sold some of her photographs of Kyiv to raise money for her brothers who served in the Ukrainian Army.  My dollars contributed to the purchase of boots and a night scope.  Her images hang in the waiting room of the California law firm in which I work.

But I do not know anyone involved in the new war into which our government has thrust the reluctant world.  Until the lady asked if she could write on our Gratitude Wall in her native language, it had been years since I conversed with anyone whom I knew came from Iran.  My son had a classmate whose father was Persian.  He spoke in his native language at times, though he worked as a civil engineer in the city where we lived.  Otherwise, I know many people from Lebanon and a few from Israel.  My mother’s paternal family came from Syria.  But my name comes from my father’s grandmother and I have clear blue eyes.

As I tarried beneath the moon, strains of an old song drifted through my mind.  Hmm mmm mmm. . . something about being under the same moon although we are far apart.  Its tune and lyrics elude me, but the idea grips me and not in the romantic way that the song intended.  Somewhere on the other side of the world, a frantic mother stands under this same gleaming orb, desperate for news of her child whom she will never again embrace.  I cannot bear the vicarious stab of her inconsolable grief.  I cast my eyes downward, start the car, and finish my drive. 

In front of my tiny house, I sit for a few minutes, gazing at the bakery box with the last of the marshmallows after a day of sharing.  When I lift it from the car seat, a sprinkle of powder sugar drifts through the air.  Suddenly I find myself sobbing as I dust the flakes to the ground.  All those children who will never taste the deliciousness of handspun confections!  I think of my own son, whose absolute rejection of everything about war and the military brooks neither equivocation or dissent.  It is time to take sides.  If neutrality ever lingered as an option, no such luxury persists.  You are for peace, or you are for war.  You cannot straddle this fence.

I shifted the car into park and turned off the engine.  In the silence of the evening, I said a prayer to whatever deity might exist, asking comfort for the mothers and the fathers,  the sisters, and the brothers; but most of all, for the broken bodies and sweet souls of the little children who went to school one day and did not return.

Then I went into the house and closed the door.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Han Bee’s marshmallows

Moon-gazing bird

Gibbous moon rising

For those who wonder:

  I did not look at the lady’s note.  I could not bear to do so.  I should have asked her what it said but I did not think of it.  She purchased a fused glass pocket heart.  As I wrapped it for her, I asked from where she came.  She said, very quietly, “I am from Iran, but I live in Sacramento now.”  I asked if her people at home were safe.  She held my eyes and whispered, “So far.”  I am not a religious person, but I instinctively pressed my hands together and bowed my head.  “May it remain so,” I heard myself say.  She replied, simply, “Thank you.”

The first time I drove onto the Delta Loop, I nearly ran off the road at the sight of a cactus bigger than my car.  It rose from the ground in front of a house on Jackson Slough Road, the western edge of the ten-mile circular stretch of levee roads on which I came to live.  I let my car stand at an idle just a few feet from the what someone later identified as a prickly pear.  In that moment it hit me that I had thrown my entire life away and journeyed to a strange new world.  Uncontrollable trembling shook my chest as the magnitude of this change overwhelmed me.

Eight years later, I sail past the surreal foliage without much thought except for its beauty.  Potted jade and ice plants adorn my 8 x 8 deck and the small yard that I’ve fashioned in front of it.  Dozens of fragrant blooms dance on my perfume bush all winter and the vines creep across the plant stand.  Though the deciduous trees shed their leaves in December, everything else in the Delta thrives on the two months of rain and wintry air.

As the California flora radiates energy so, too, do sensations of growth ripple along the fibers of my being.  I came to a few realizations this week and spent four days pushing myself to act on them.  Sparks flew as my nose touched the grindstone in the California lawyer’s office where I work Monday through Thursday.  I had let files accumulate in untidy piles.  Forty years of a lawyer’s instinct for order and diligence had slipped into the morass of not-licensed-here laziness.  By the end of this work day, I had touched and moved forward every file in my little work-cubby.  Mundane and strained though my role there might be, I acquitted myself well this week.

At home, I spent each evening attacking the  piles of clutter which had adhered themselves to every surface.  With donated baskets from a friend, I organized those piles under chairs in my sitting room.  Shoes that have never quite found a home now live in a lidded plastic box in the small space beneath the hanging clothes in my 21-inch closet.  As I sit at my sweet cherry table to type, I see paintings, photographs, and mementos in frames grouped on walls, climbing the stairs under the east-facing window.  Angels perch on shelves, hang from nails, and sit in circles next to table lamps.  My style would not suit many people, but it feels right to me.

For the next three days, I morph into a shop owner and art patron.  My phone will turn its eye on customers and cohorts as they push open the door and stroll through the collective.  A ready smile will greet them from behind the cash stand.  As night deepens, I will putter in my tiny house, with the silence settling like fairy dust on my shoulders.   Each morning, I will stand on the porch and study the winter grime that has accumulated there, daydreaming about new furniture and a summer shade overhead. 

As I drive towards town, a big ship will glide through the channel, and I will tarry at the sight of it, bigger than my car, bigger than my house , bigger than all three houses that I’ve owned put together.  I will watch as it passes our marina, headed towards the confluence of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento.  It will turn left, headed west, towards the Bay and then to the wide open sea.  I will not resume my drive until I can no longer detect even the outline of its stern.  Eventually,  will remain to be seen but the blue of the river and the brief flicker of a swan’s tail in the ripple of the slough.  Only then will I shift my foot to the accelerator, and  continue on my own steady landlocked way.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Succulents in Isleton

Swans in the slough

My perfume bush (right)

My mother stopped giving me beef in late grade school or early high school.  She called the doctor and told him that I vomited every time I ate meat.  “Don’t give it to her,” he allegedly advised.    I don’t know if that’s exactly what happened or if it’s one of those memories that time created for me, but I haven’t eaten red meat since then. 

I attended college in the mid-70s when there were two types of plant-based diets:  Vegetarian, and lacto-ovo vegetarian.  I chose the latter path, because what is life without eggs and butter? Truthfully, I struggled with the rest of it.   I’m not much of a cook, and the mainstay of vegetarians, beans, upset my stomach. This annoying proclivity later morphed into full-blown IBS though I didn’t develop an insufferable intolerance of legumes and dairy until my mid-40s.    For decades, nuts, seeds, eggs, lentils and yogurt comprised my primary protein sources.  

My choice of food did not reflect any moral underpinning.  I ate what my body could process.  Sometimes I tried chicken and occasionally pork or fish, but only rarely and never without profound intestinal regret.  I had vegan friends who rolled their eyes at my shallow disregard for other beings.  I once dated someone who said he couldn’t be around me if I continued to eat anything not plant-based.  I cautioned him not to make me choose between him and butter.  I reminded him that some scientists believe that plants scream when you cut them.  He faded from my life, messaging that he would pray for me.  Nice of him.

It’s late winter in Northern California.  The snow geese and sandhill cranes settle in the flooded fields of our island.  Dark Canadians cut through the grey sky between bouts of torrential rain.  I regret letting my camera batteries grow so old that they no longer hold a charge.  I linger on the levee roads, watching the wide swathes of fluttering white creatures forage in the ruts left by the fall harvest.  They lift from the ground  in twos or threes and land a few feet away, searching in the standing water for food.  Overhead, the raucous cry of cranes signals the approach of nightfall.

Friends recently debated the merits of hunting snow geese on someone’s social media feet.  My fingers hammered a harsh protest against killing the beautiful fowl.  Someone replied with a long tirade about the virtues of snow geese as game and their vast numbers, which he apparently thought would persuade me.  I briefly thought of my cousin Kati, who runs a pig rescue operation and foreswears anything not strictly vegan.  I typed my short response:  I don’t eat meat; and left the conversation.

Driving to Lodi today, I saw row after row of the migratory birds cutting through the air over soggy fallow fields.  My heart swelled with envy as their long formation disappeared near the distant horizon.  I closed my eyes and sent a silent plea:  Let no hunters find them.  Let them journey onward unmolested.

I had sweet potato and carrots for dinner tonight.  No creatures suffered for my nourishment.  I will have farm-fresh eggs for breakfast, scrambled with butter from cows that I can only hope were housed in comfort.  I understand that not everyone likes the geese, and I recognize that many people hunt to eat.  As for myself, I never tire of their noisy arrival in the open land behind our park.  I do not weary of the sight of the flock rising at dawn, spreading their wings, and riding the wind to the next destination in their perennial search for a warmer, more welcoming climate.  I regret only that I remain earthbound as they glide across the sky and leave me standing alone, in the relentless morning rain, wishing that I could fly.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

A week or so ago, I stood outside my tiny house beside my aging Toyota RAV4 and thought about leaves.  Across the gravel road on which my house sits, trees that have become as familiar to me as the Midwestern sunshine rose against the background of a lingering sunset.  Fierce gold had settled into gentle pink.  The outline of the trees against the whisper of retreating rays held me for a long, quiet moment.

I studied the sprinkle of crushed debris on the yard around me.  Those leaves fell from the California oak which towers over my neighbor’s house.  They dissolve into the dirt to feed the scraggly grass and the succulents that have broken through their pots and sent their roots into the soil.  I looked again towards the nearly bare branches, wondering why some leaves succumbed to winter’s hold and float to the ground while others stubbornly cling to their perch.

Today the world’s sports fans will watch two teams compete for the season’s title while I sit in my shop and think about anniversaries and celebrations.  In six day’s time, lovers and partners and spouses will exchange heart-shaped boxes of candy.  They will demurely lower their eyes as envelopes open and cards slide out.  Shy smiles will dawn as the scrawled messages get read aloud.  They will embrace and toast the endurance of their romance for yet another year.

For me, Valentine’s day holds bittersweet memories of a note  thrust into my hand right after the announcement of an impending departure.  But it has more hopeful meaning as well.  On 14 February 1997, I lay in a hospital bed beneath the dour gaze of a middle-aged  pulmonologist.  My neurologist stood beside him, shaking his small grey head and concurring in the lung guy’s pronouncement of my certain and hasty doom.  Six months, he had said.  Have you got someone prepared to take your child?  I had, several people; but I didn’t like to think about that eventuality.  I turned my head to the window, through which the grey light of a cold Kansas City day strained for entry.  Eventually, the two men left.

My son had started kindergarten that year.  On his first day, I struggled to lead him up the stairs from his pre-school to the august heights of a newly promoted elementary student.  He stopped halfway.  He drew his head back and said, Are you going to die before I get big, Mom? And I promised him that I would live to be one-hundred-and-three.  We continued our journey into his next phase of life while my heart sank and my anxiety blossomed.

But I did live.  Now John Prine plays on the Bluetooth speaker outside while my friend Moira arranges for a cup of Earl Grey from the coffee shop.  Little whisps of clouds drift past.  Occasionally snow geese or cranes cut across the blue.  Ruby brings an egg sandwich.  One or two customers, not yet settled at the bar for the game, wander into the store and peruse the art.  I sit and think, and sip my tea, and watch the shadows of paper cranes from the mobile in the corner dance across the ceiling.  John Prine keeps singing.  Cars go past.  The days of another year scatter at my feet, like the dry leaves that blow across the levee road at home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I sit in my tiny house 2000 miles from the river near which I spent my childhood.  The San Joaquin silently glides past the marina out beyond the levee road, just a few yards away in the dark of the Delta night.  Decades stretch between our bay and the wide Mississippi of my youth.

Two days ago, my brother Mark slipped from this world to whatever lies beyond us.  We had not been close for years but  as a child, I worshipped him.  He primed me for that idolatry with his silent strength and his adolescent swagger.  He paid me twenty-five cents to tell visitors that between us we knew everything — He knew everything, and I knew him.  I’m not sure he ever satisfied the substantial debt for my repeated assertions but I didn’t care.  I never minded anything he did back then.  

Mark defended my honor in the neighborhood against what today would be considered impermissible bullying curtailed by teachers and parents.  Bigger boys taunted me as I struggled to keep pace with their play.  Mark and Kevin, two and four years older than I am, stepped in front of them with raised fists.  They didn’t have to say anything; the set of their jaws gave sufficient warning.  Transgressors backed from their glare as  I cowered behind my big brothers, whimpering, fearful, and anxious.  Mark’s clumsy assurances calmed me as the two of them guided me towards home.

We walked a couple of miles each way to our parish school.  The shortcut took us over train tracks high on a ridge.  One time, as the long low whistle sounded, I urged my useless legs over the rails.  Mark scrambled backward, grabbed my shirt, and dragged me out of the path just as the locomotive reached us.  We tumbled down the embankment, landing hard against the asphalt at the bottom of the hill.  We lay there for a long time before Mark stood, pulled me to my feet, and dusted the dried leaves from my uniform.  We never spoke.  We never said a word, not then, not when we got home, not in all the years since that day.  But I have not forgotten.

Eventually we grew apart, maybe for legitimate reasons, maybe just due to time and distance.  Every family has its small clicks and so, too does ours.  I have siblings with whom I am close and siblings with whom I have less contact.  Over the years, I saw Mark at family events — funerals, weddings, the cousins reunion.  He treated my son with kindness the time or two that they interacted in my son’s young adulthood.   Mark and I exchanged only brief pleasantries at these gatherings and I made no effort to cultivate more.  I left it alone, and so did he.  I’m close to one sister, and my youngest brother that died in 1997, and my older brother Kevin.  I had no bandwidth for breaking barriers, or scaling walls, or confronting old wounds over which scabs had only lightly formed.

But as far as I could tell from where I stood, he lived a good life.  He had a partner that adored him  and children who drew their life’s lessons from him.  I saw him once with his granddaughter in a moment so tender that it left me breathless.  I have a picture somewhere, and occasionally I come across it.  If you turned a dictionary to “grandfather”, that photograph would be the perfect illustration.  A little red-haired girl, sitting  on her papa’s lap, safe, enraptured, completely at ease.

I represented Mark when he adopted his wife’s young son.  We went to court in a large, comfortable room in St. Louis County, with the child sitting on my brother’s lap.  As I went through the questions, I repeatedly referred to “the petitioner, Mark Louis Corley”.  Each time, my nephew, not yet five, exclaimed, “That’s my Daddy!”  By the time the judge granted the petition, even he had to wipe away tears.  The court reporter asked if she could hug me after everyone had left and I stood by the counsel table, gathering my things.  “In all my years here, I’ve never seen anything like this,” she admitted.  “That’s quite a brother you’ve got there.”  I closed my briefcase, smiled, and told her that I agreed.  

My brother Mark lost a daughter, a brother, and his mother who presumably await him on the banks of the eternal river.  I hope he can stroll without pain now, in the cool breezes of paradise, under a willow tree, his baby girl in his arms.   I know his wife and the children still living — his sons, his daughter — and his grandchildren, as well as the rest of us, will mourn his passing.  The end of a life of filled with love and passion can never be easily accepted.  But if some other existence does follow this one, then I know for certain Mark’s will have music, and laughter, and the endless peace which he deserves.  Nothing less would be fair.  Nothing less would be heaven.

Fare thee well, my brother.  Thank you for carrying me through the difficult days of our childhood, and for being a part of what good I took from those troubled times.   Give my love to Hot Lips Mama and to your friend and mine, Stevie Pat.  Rest easy, now.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The eight Corley siblings: Top row – Adrienne, Ann, Joyce, Kevin; Bottom row: Mary Corinne, Stephen, Frank, Mark

Mark and my son Patrick

Brokedown Palace, Grateful Dead