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®
