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

The world turns and all of a sudden, I can get fresh fruit in the local stores.  My hands eagerly fumble through the bins.  A few roll onto the floor and skitter across the produce section.  I smile at the clerk who corrals them and wipes them with his cloth.

Mornings break in a roll of fog across the meadow.  Our park sits below sea level so the heavy dew clings to our porches, our houses, and our vehicles.   I huddle within my new winter coat, grateful for the warmth of its cashmere shell and silk quilting.  The blue tam that I crocheted with wool spun by my oldest sister guards my head.  I wrap a knit scarf around my neck and gaze skyward, scanning for the geese whose noisy honk has startled me.

Sleep often dances in the dark of my tiny bedroom, eluding capture.  My grogginess makes the cold bite more closely.  The events of the world nag at me, heavy weights on my brittle psyche.   The turmoil surrounding the policies of the current federal administration haunts me.  Parents torn from children; communities disrupted; people shot, people crying, people dying.

When the war in Ukraine first started, I followed its events even more closely than I might have because a friend’s brothers fought in the Ukrainian army.  People would greet me with a query as to my condition.  “No bombs falling on my village,” I’d respond, to varying degrees of comprehension.  I have a new answer now.  When someone asks how I am, I simply reply, “No one has shot me in the face today.”  Everyone knows what I mean.  Everyone nods.  Some even reach to share a brief, empathetic hug.

Normal life seems wrong to enjoy.  Where my sister lives, gangs of federal agents roam the icy streets.  As a medical professional, she’s doing virtual visits for people who fear leaving their homes.  She’s taken “ICE watch” training.  Sixty miles west of me, peaceful protesters gather in the streets of the City, taking a stand against the wanton raids.  I strain to think of any way that I can help from the rough inland refuge that I staked for myself.

I marched in 2018 for the rights of women and again that year for our immigrant neighbors.  In Sacramento and Vacaville, I stood with strangers and decried the first Trump administration.  But I have aged since then while adding to my daily responsibilities.  Now I can only repost critical information and donate to groups that lead the resistance.   

As for myself, there are, in fact, no bombs falling on my village; in fact no one has shot me in the face.  I’ve seen two ICE raids in the town where I work.  Rumors of several more circulate on social media.  No one showed for a class that one of my artists planned to teach in Spanish even though we posted the rules of entry at our store in accordance with California and federal law.  No judicial warrant, no entry.  No masks, no guns, no warrantless searches.  I taped it next to our recitation of bigotry that we will not tolerate.   Plain and simple.

I try to put myself in the skin of the people confronted by immigration agents.  I remember the few unpleasant encounters that I, a small disabled white female, have experienced in a lifetime of otherwise unnoteworthy interactions.  Once a Kansas City, Kansas officer drew down on me as approached him to ask for directions.  We froze, his partner raising a cautionary hand.  I whispered, I’m a Jackson County prosecutor; I carry a badge.  He slowly rose and holstered his weapon.  The moment passed.

Another time, in an affluent neighborhood, I got stopped for running a red light.  The cop told me to get out of the vehicle.  I glanced at my sleeping baby in the car seat.    I quietly refused his order.  He leaned closer to my face and repeated his direction between gritted teeth gleaming in the frosty glow of the street light.  I again said that I would not.  I told him, softly, that he could write a ticket but I would not get out of the car and leave my child.  His radio crackled as he hesitated.  But then, because I am who I am, what I am, and the color that I am, he relented.

I cannot even fathom what the Somali-Americans experience on the snow-laden streets of Minneapolis.  My heart sinks at the mere thought of the terror.  If I am sleepless in the California Delta, what exhaustion must their first-hand worry cause them to suffer?

Meanwhile, citrus season unfolds, telling me that I’ve now been in California for eight years, of which I have been a full-time resident for seven.  My presence in the park has grown.   My original four-foot porch morphed into a 10 x 8 deck with quarter-panels of trellis for privacy and a tangle of vines that bloom each spring.  My dwarf lime tree shriveled after a year or two of yielding fruit but my succulents thrive and the rainy January has inspired my perfume bush to bloom.   I have a drawer filled with mandarins, their leaves sending fragrant wafts into the house whenever I open the fridge door.    And, with a northward nod, I have increased my monthly contribution to the ACLU.  It isn’t much, but it’s something.  I will keep watch for other things.

For nowadays, the world is lit by lightening, though in my small, secluded corner, life continues.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Rain hammers on the steel roof of my tiny house, over and over in its relentless erratic pattern. A podcaster drones between clips of Jack Smith’s deposition. I think, briefly, of just playing the whole thing but eight hours? It won’t change my mind. Soundbites will do, though I did listen to the entire opening statement. Its primary impact on me? It drew forth my longing to practice law again.

Earlier, I listened to another group talk about the waning year. They seemed to agree that events unfolded more starkly than they predicted yet they seemed hopeful. Each offered a unique point of view but all agreed that America had squandered her soft power, caused the death of thousands, and left millions without the ability to buy health insurance. What a mess, I thought, as I boiled potatoes and heated tempeh in my favorite little cast iron skillet.

The electric heater has quieted. In a minute, I will need to go wind its dial. I’ve been thinking of installing a different kind of heat — propane, possibly, or a small wood stove. I would put that in a corner of my sitting room and watch the flames as I wrapped myself in the shawl that I’ve carried from home to home since 1987. A weaver in Arkansas made it. I think of winter in those mountains, of the mud, and the snow, and the quiet hours with no television and howling wind. December in the Delta reminds me of the wintry Ozarks and I am a bit taken aback to think of how many years have fallen away since my time there.

I spent last week in Missouri, first in St. Louis and then across the state in KC. I spent several hours in Union with my brother Kevin and his sweet wife Melissa, in their cheerful, cozy home with original art and eclectic curios. My sister Joyce and I had a wonderful time thrift-shopping and talking over small plates in a restaurant at the hotel where I stayed, thanks to her largesse. Before heading west, I had breakfast with a high school friend and met her husband and grown children. Then off to 39th Street and Prospero’s Books, Rm 39, and the Plaza. Friend after friend greeted me with hugs and grins. Their enthusiasm shocked me. The five-day trip seemed to last five seconds. The list of people whom I could not see presses against my heart. At 70, I recognize that each trip home might be my last, or the last chance to spend time with any one of those kind souls who have enriched my life for decades.

I did not drive past my old house. I know the woman who bought it from me has made her own memories in it. She’s had a beautiful child, photos of whom I have seen on social media. I did not sell to the highest bidder. Instead, I chose someone whom I thought would love the place as much as I did. While I miss that bungalow, the fact that the new owner gets to raise her daughter there confirms the rightness of my selection.

Seeing those photos also solidifies my keen realization that while I will always be welcome in my Kansas City haunts, it is not truly my home any longer. This 200 square-foot rectangle and the rural area in which it sits fill that role now. I live among people with their own tiny houses and trailers, in the circle which surrounds the big meadow here, the old oaks, and the shady rows on the east side of the park. A ten-mile stretch of levee road defines our neighborhood. Around its curves, other parks and marinas form their own small hives. Boats navigate the sloughs and pull into slips, tie themselves to the dock with sturdy knots, and hunker down for the cold weeks ahead. The rain comes, and the wind blows, and the swans drift into the curves under the dying hyacinth.

Another year will dawn in four hours. I will likely fall asleep before that moment. I will wash the dishes, start a load of clothes, and drape my tired limbs in woolen blankets. The sound of the rain will be the last thing I hear before closing my eyes and surrendering to the satisfaction of sleep. When morning comes, I will embrace the prospect of a year to fill as I choose. As I wait for the kettle to boil so I can brew my coffee, I will, no doubt, make a reckless host of resolutions, some of which I might even keep.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I’ve seen the quote attributed to various people, most often to Malia Makana but sometimes to other writers, almost all female. The author, the speaker, avows that she has differently assembled herself. Presumably time has passed since the person to whom the assurance is given has seen her. “I put the pieces back differently,” she vouchsafes.

I feel her, whomever she is.

I recently got a message from a man who only knows me through my writing and my comments on his poetry. We’ve never met in real time. I believe we might have spoken on the phone once, years ago, at least a decade. He’s married to someone whom I have met, in the days before they married. They both write.

In the gentleman’s message, he commented on the emotions he thinks permeate recent social media posts of mine. His sincerity reached me. I do not agree with his assessment, but I concede that neither of us can claim objectivity. I do not know what motivates him; as for myself, I’m trying to survive. Flying under the radar serves me, as do cryptic replies and gentle smiles.

The crows returned to the Delta this week. They settle on guy wires and the spindly branches of winter trees. They hover on the levee roads, deigning to move only if you tap your horn and insist. With breathtaking wingspans and fat, cornfield-fed bodies, they could raise a small dog into the air but don’t bother. They catch my attention as I drive to work. I wonder where they live in warmer months but not enough to even run a simple Internet search. They’re here; and in the spring, with the snow geese, they leave. We stay behind and watch as they lift their unwieldy figures into air that we cannot even touch.

The acquaintance who messaged me comments on what he sees as dark moods. As I read his words, a strange sensation courses through me. He has no idea. I stumble through most days in a daze, tired, puzzled, stunned even. I see the grey hair and quiet eyes in my mirror. I truly had no idea that I would make it to seventy, but at the same time, I never forgot that I promised to live practically forever. Both cannot be true, so I just kept walking, best foot forward, hoping for the best — whatever one could say that might be.

Another person whom I know has gone abroad and remarks, again on social media, that holidays depress her. She sees herself as having failed to acquire the packaged life that she though women must have Husband, kids, PTA meetings, a spotless house, deftly wrapped presents under the tree. I understand what she feels. I perceive myself as blowing that chance three-fold. Even as I type those words, I hear protests about how great people think I am, how much good I have done, how many children I helped. Their words come too late, decades after I internalized the droning mantras about what makes a real woman.

Yet I am not unhappy, despite the occasional bout of melancholy. Unbidden smiles do spring to my face. Jokes occasionally tickle my fancy. Small children come into my shop and hunt for the 3D dragons that we’ve hidden low shelves and their squeals of delight satisfy me. They show me their finds. When I ask them to pick one to keep, they study the inch-high figures, select one, and scurry through the rooms of our store to re-hide the rest. One cannot ask for much more than this: To provide a safe space for people’s sons and daughters to play while their grown-ups browse the beautiful art.

If longing overcomes me from time to time, it shares space with a growing sense of content. The shelf on which I once displayed copies of my book stands empty. I only sold a couple hundred copies, but the other day, a customer mentioned having read it. “It took me all year,” she remarked. “I read one piece each week. They delighted me.” She paid for whatever she had selected that day, wished me “Happy Holidays”, and left the store, unaware of the absolute astonishment coursing through my veins. Is this how real writers feel, I asked myself. Like someone tied a string to their heart and took them across the ocean tied to the stem of a golden sailboat?

I think of all the people who delighted in taking a tap hammer to that same organ, smashing it to the pieces that I’ve painstakingly reglued to form my new self. I can’t lay claim to putting the pieces back together in a different pattern with deliberate intention. It’s more a matter of fumbling, fingers numb, hastening to jam the jagged shards in place before the super glue hardens. I pry open clamps meant for holding wood and ease them onto the fragile porcelain of my splintered psyche. Too late, I recall the Japanese practice of repairing broken bowls with liquid gold. Oh well, I tell myself, with an inward shrug. I’m far from perfect, but perhaps, in the end, I will suffice.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The Crystal Gazer

Sara Teasdale 1884 – 1933

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro.

Being a recovering Catholic on Christmas has its own special fragrance of irony. Roman Catholics disdain that universal badge of Christianity that might have sustained me when I realized that the church itself contributed to the derailment of my emotional stability. But no: Catholics hold themselves out as a different breed. When you walk away from the church, you leave a cult and all its trappings behind your weary self.

What does Christmas become, when it’s not a celebration of the birth of the son of an immigrant visited by an angel with news that a divine child would come to her? The secular holiday has Santa, an outgrowth of a Catholic Saint; and little elves who serve him while a rosy-cheeked Mrs. Claus beams from the sidelines. You can do that, of course. You haul the artificial tree home from the box store and scatter the family ornaments through its branches. You invent traditions and borrow a few from your childhood with which to delight your offspring. The Tree Elf brings a present on the first night that the tree twinkles in your living room. Santa uses the same paper every year, to distinguish his gifts from yours. You sprinkle silver Hershey’s Kisses on the front walk, and explain that one of the elves must have dragged the red bag across the snow and worn a hole in it. Every year a train circles the floor and a small stuffed animal peeks out of the stocking.

But what does it mean? As the single mother of an only child, I cultivated families to get a little of the group cheer that flavored my childhood Decembers. We went caroling with the daycare group one year. During pre-school, we got invited to people’s homes where wine flowed freely and steaming mugs of chocolate smelled like peppermint. Every undertaking smacked of frantic efforts to stave off despair, or failure. Would my son remember those days with fondness, or would he consider that he had been deprived of normalcy? Should I have taken him to Mass? He seemed reluctant to sit on Santa’s lap at the mall. Had I explained that tradition well enough to make it fun?

I understand that I have romanticized the holidays of my memory. I know the grimness of certain immutable aspects of our household. The vagaries of our home life drove the scarcity of commercial trappings. Our mother could only afford to give us small presents. Anything of value certainly originated with my father’s mother or the S&H green stamps redemption program. I never felt cheated, though. Everything under the tree delighted us. The cookies on the aluminum tray tasted sweet and billowy. Wonderful scents filled the night air as we walked to midnight Mass. If anything awful happened on any given Christmas, I have thankfully suppressed any recollection of it. Only the lingering strains of “Silent Night” run through my mind, its serene melody mingling with the lively bounce of songs about Rudolph and his gang of reindeers.

My son came to California a few days after I moved here to help me unpack and celebrate Christmas. He had a little tree delivered from Amazon. We hung lights from the one big window and went to Christmas dinner at the home of some folks that I knew who lived in Windsor. I got him a banjo. I don’t remember what he gave me, but I’m sure he put a lot of thought into its selection; he always does. We rode the train to San Francisco on Christmas Eve and went to the top of Coit Tower. We walked the city streets until we found an open Chinese restaurant, where we feasted on our favorite things. I have to say, that Christmas shines as one of my best.

This year, I will spend Christmas with my sister Joyce, following which I will drive to Kansas City to see my old friends. I saw my son last year for Christmas and this summer for his birthday, so we won’t be together this year. I think he has plans, though, which I am hoping will bring joy to his life.

When my son was three or four, we went to church with some friends on Christmas. I stood around feeling awkward and out of place while Patrick visited with a few well-appointed ladies who found his curls charming. One of them bent down and said, “Do you know whose birthday is today, little boy?”

Patrick chortled. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “It’s Uncle Steve’s birthday!”

I can’t say which expression I more clearly remember, the shock on the woman’s face or the delight on my son’s little cherub countenance. He was right, of course. This year, my baby brother would have turned 66, had he not died alone one summer’s day in 1997. The day will always have that bittersweet note of a lost loved one for me, another birthday he will not see, another German chocolate cake that won’t get baked, another dance that none of us enjoy as the music swells around us and your friend and mine, Stephen Patrick Corley, kicks up his fancy leather-shod heels.

So, this is Christmas. Another year over and a new one nearly begun. I sit in the shop that I founded in the small, struggling town of Isleton, in the California Delta, and listen to Bing Crosby on my Bluetooth speaker outside. I had a rash of customers mid-day, before the Sunday act started at the local beer room. It’s quiet now, and gloom begins to gather as the sun struggles to finish its duty from behind the clouds. The sky spans gray, but it won’t snow. It might rain, though; but with any luck, I will make it home before the downpour.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

My mother died on 21 August 1985, at just before seven in the morning, two weeks before my thirtieth birthday and just under three weeks from her fifty-ninth. She never got to heal from decades of trauma or help her children do the same. I have spent the last four decades trying to recover for both of us.

My long, slow slide into our shared recovery often finds me walking paths that she might traverse, in another time, another place, but so similar as to meld into a shadowy memory. When I pull into the parking lot of a thrift store — the junkier, the better — I hear her voice exclaim that this will be a goldmine. She steps in the dusty aisles with me, lifting a dish now and then to glance at the marking. Ah, Haviland, she would say, with a knowing smile. I used to have a collection of Limoges soup bowls that she and I had found together. I don’t know what happened to them when I moved; perhaps they made their way to Saver’s in one of the manydonation boxes.

In my mother-in-law’s hutch, I keep the yellow clay pitcher from my mother’s bedside. During her last illness, we kept it filled with ice and water. It’s nothing special, not from a monetary sense, but it means a lot to me. Right now it’s filled with coins and dollar bills. I used to throw change in a blue tea pot that my sister’s daughter game me. When I downsized, I gave the whole teapot, coins and all, to my son. I started over with my mother’s pitcher when I moved to California. I don’t have any plans for the accumulated money except that now, I suppose, the pennies will become collector’s items. Mother might find that funny.

I get my once-auburn hair from mom. In grade school, they called me “the red-headed crippled girl”. The little boys pulled my pigtails and I would struggle to get away from them. I remember my mother combing out the braids and telling me not to worry, that some day it would not matter if I walked funny. I’m still waiting but I don’t wear my hair down much anymore.

After all the kids moved out of the house, my mother took up gardening. She filled in the space where the driveway used to go down into a garage under the house and planted flowers there. She dug up the backyard for vegetables and planted tomatoes on the long strip facing south at the side. Somewhere in a box under the bed in my sleeping loft, I have a photograph of my mother on a bench at the far back of the yard where we used to have a swing set. She has a scarf tied around her hairless head. My nephew Rick stands beside her. The chemotherapy had taken its toll in ways far more impactful than her hair loss, but that seemed to bother her more than anything. It must have been my sister Joyce who found the pretty scarves for Mom, since Joyce lived nearby and took such good care of her. I didn’t inherit my mother’s green thumb, but succulents grow themselves in California . I surround myself with them, perhaps in something of an homage to the beautiful garden in which my mother might have enjoyed a peaceful old age, had she lived.

When I sit on my porch among those hardy plants, my mother’s memory comes to me in something far too pleasant to describe as a haunting. She had a way of lifting one eyebrow that sent me into hysterical giggles. I went to the symphony with her a lot during high school, and she never failed to get into conversation with those in the seats around us. But she insistent on silence when the music started. Once, when my parents went together and I stayed home, two women kept talking through the first piece. My mother finally leaned down and said, in a loud stage whisper, “Must you talk?” One of them turned around and snapped, “Yes, we must.” They turned out to be reviewers.

In the decade during which my mother’s life calmed enough for jaunts, she and my father took to driving out into the country. I never got to go along on one of those jaunts. By that time, I must have been living in South Saint Louis, consuming too much single malt and pursuing a mediocre college career. But I heard about them. I vividly recall her describing a day in St. Genevieve, Missouri. Her eyes shone as she talked about their lunch, some antique store that she liked, and the beauty of the countryside. I’ve never been there; I suspect it’s not the same as my mother saw it, all those years ago and through eyes which longed to behold a little quiet goodness.

My parents instituted a kind of uneasy truce between them in what they did not anticipate would be the last years of my mother’s life, between the late 1970s and 1985. Dad had quit drinking or taken it underground. In 1977, he suffered a major heart attack which ultimately necessitated cardiac bypass surgery. Reportedly he asked the recovering room nurse how many bypasses they had given him. “Seven,” she said. He claimed to have contemplated and then asked the record number for a single operation. When told “eight”, he gleefully demanded, “Wheel me back in, I want two more!” My mother told the story with a girlish laugh while my father rolled his eyes. They acted like that, in the last years of their married life — more like the post-war newly weds that I imagine them having been. The chaos and turmoil that besieged our family seemed to fade into the background. My mother continued working, my father helped our neighbor in his upholstery shop, and they went on daytrips to small towns in the Missouri countryside.

In the fifteen or so years that I served as an attorney for children in high conflict households and the foster system, I learned a lot which applied to my own childhood. From that perspective, I gazed backwards at the choices our mother made, the most pivotal being to stay. We learn in studying family violence that survivors remain in the home for many reasons, mostly associated with the belief that they have no where to go and no way to take care of themselves or their children on their own. In 2025, I hope this reality has evolved and that more and more survivors get out and get help. As for myself, and speaking only for myself, I will be satisfied if I can heal in ways that my mother never lived to experience; and if the generational curse does not corrupt my son any more than it might already have done. He deserves the chance for happiness that my mother so longed to find, on those Sunday drives, forty years ago, in the Missouri of another era.

Mugwumpishly tendered.

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

An artist asks me to come see how she has curated her work. I take my walking stick in hand — dreaded stick, hated stick, stick that deters more than it enables — and make my way down the hall.

My heart stops. Or maybe it simply skips one beat and then continues, but in that quick arrythmia a flash of memory lives.

She has painted a flower, maybe an iris but perhaps not. I see an iris though, delicate purple petals on a vivid green stem. Suddenly my hand wraps itself around a black mug bearing careful lines drawn by a quiet artist in a tiny nation far to the east.

The cup holds thick coffee poured from a stove-top percolator. It will pass from my small cautious hand to the strong fist of my brother Stephen. He will add milk to it while clenching a burning Marlboro between his lips and grumbling at me. Later that cup will go out to his car and ride with him to wherever he worked that year, possibly at a bar, maybe on a medic’s rig. I can’t recall.

The iris cup came to our parents’ house with him when he moved back that time. A few months later, I arrived on his well-worn heels. We bolstered each other’s flagging egos in those brief encounters in the kitchen. He didn’t eat much then; he drank coffee with cream, smoked cigarettes, and poured a finger of neat whiskey into a tumbler whenever he felt unable to cope. Later, other poisons would be necessary but in those early days, the late seventies, single malt did the trick well enough for both of us.

Over the next few months, I found a job, got my grad school admission reinstated, and moved into a south St. Louis apartment. Steve traveled a similar path. Neither of us could be seen as successful, not then, and — at least, for me, the only left to be judged — not now. But we got by.

That iris cup found its way to my apartment, eventually, perhaps because my brother stopped by one day and forgot it. I never made any move to get it back to him. I mostly used it for tea, preferring something chunkier for the strong black coffee that remains my morning beverage of choice. I drank tea in the evening during my carefree misspent youth, though not the sissy stuff, mostly Earl Grey, hot. I liked my brother’s mug for that.

Two decades later, my little brother died by his own hand, alone, leaning against a tree on land that he loved. Eventually, I laid claim to several mementos of him, including his two favorite coffee mugs that in turn made their way to his estranged daughters. I kept the pretty iris-adorned vessel for another few years. One day I dropped it on the concrete of my porch and collapsed in a rocker, sobbing, staring at the shards and thinking of my brother. Stephen, dancing; Stephen, slinging draft beer; Stephen, striding across the airport and catching me in his arms, twirling me high over his head. Stephen standing in our parents’ kitchen all those years ago, telling me not to laugh at his hangover before I looked in a mirror. Your friend and mine, Stephen Patrick Corley. The last-born, the child who was to be named “Christopher” because of his December 25th birthday, but who got named “Even Stephen” instead because he made the genders four and four in our motley tribe.

You can find anything online these days. With a simple search, I found what I think might be the actual line from which my little brother’s cup derived. The seller has four, and would part with them if I sent $32.00 plus shipping. I stared at the listing for a long time before closing the browser. Maybe the memory suffices. Maybe if I had those mugs, using them would never be as satisfying as when that lone survivor went back and forth between my little brother and me. They would never have borne first his touch and then mine, nourishing each of us, keeping some needed connection alive, back in a time when life seemed bleak but held at least a glimmer of possibility.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®