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®

I do not see the moon as a huntress, or a harsh mistress. She rises in the east and quietly catches the setting sun’s golden glow. She reflects my lot in life: The dull orb that has no light of her own, but rather stands near the shining star and hopes for secondary accolades.

On the way home tonight, I caught her silent lift from land to sky over the tomato field that spans the wide ground between the parks on the ten-mile loop of levee roads. She asked nothing more than a momentary glance; she posed for my camera, feeble though my lens would certainly be. I caught a smile on her right profile, no more than a brief shadow in the orange haze. Truckloads of produce rumbled past the spot where I idled to admire the twilight orb. To the west, the fierce and fading sunset danced its way to China as her calmer cousin cast a pale protective glow across California.

I pulled into my lot as the moon rose over the trees and the night air darkened. With a long last glance, I climbed the four stairs to my doorway and used the last bit of battery from my phone to find the lock. I took the sweet sight of the moon’s kindly gaze with me into the silent space that I call “home”.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Moonlight

Sara Teasdale, 1884 – 1933

It will not hurt me when I am old,
A running tide where moonlight burned
Will not sting me like silver snakes;
The years will make me sad and cold,
It is the happy heart that breaks.

The heart asks more than life can give,
When that is learned, then all is learned;
The waves break fold on jewelled fold,
But beauty itself is fugitive,
It will not hurt me when I am old.

I use the title with full awareness of its irony, since the original purveyor of that phrase has been fully co-opted. I use it without regard for whether or not it bears copyright protection. Since we have entered the phase of American decline in which rules and laws do not matter, I grab each metaphor, throw each image to the wind with abandon, and deliberately stop sucking it up, Buttercup.

I rarely use this meagerly read blogsite for anything political. I used to have an entire political blog, but a major hack and an accidental failure to renew its domain sent that into retirement. For a decade, I toyed with trying to live without complaint, but that site, too, succumbed to the fiends of the interwebs. I found myself dawdling here, trying to rebuild my writing life. In the meantime, the years crumbled and other projects waggled their various digits in my direction, vying for my strained and fading focus.

But recent events in the nation where I live demand comment. Canceling subscriptions and sharing excellent pieces by others no longer satisfies my need to contribute to the protest, though if I may recommend just one, it would be the emergency triad of Jonathan V. Last on The Bulwark. JVL writes as I once aspired to do, and seemingly without fear. So, let me be as clear as a seventy-year-old disillusioned Democrat can be: I do not know much, but I understand that we stand in the breach and no net has been raised to catch us. If we are to be saved, we must stretch our arms to each other and form the bridge which will carry us to safety.

I attended law school from 1980 through May of 1983 and got my law license the following September. In the intervening years, constitutional issues presented themselves only tangentially in my practice and my political involvement. But I have only forgotten a little of what I learned, though I recognize that the law evolves with the passage of time. I had to run a quick search to confirm that the 14th Amendment forces state and local governments to honor one’s First Amendment rights before answering a stranger’s query; and I concede that I could use a refresher course on the degree to which a teacher’s private life can be regulated. Quite frankly, the issue rarely arises in the family law arena where I spent the bulk of my active practice.

Now, though, such questions bombard me. So I depend on the writings of others for some of my analysis as I struggle to process contemporary events. But the ghost of Professor John Scurlock stood over me and shook my cage yesterday, demanding my attention to the “indefinite suspension” of Jimmy Kimmel from his television show for the mildest of criticism of the political party of the elected American president.

Make no mistake: Kimmel did not lose his audience because he disparaged a murdered man. Rather, the wrath flowed from a threat to his network’s license after he asserted that Trump’s party loyalists wanted to blame others for Mr. Kirk’s death and that Trump’s posture of mourning seemed childish. You can do an internet search for the exact quote, though you will find it most cleanly portrayed including with accurate headlines in the foreign press such as this article.

The number of times that I have quoted, cited, or alluded to “First They Came” by Martin Niemoller in the last six months surely tips the scale of decency. I find that I still have to goad myself into action. What do I fear? I have a job — will my employer’s client base shake their collective conservative fingers and demand my termination? I have a shop — will sales suffer? I have a law license, a driver’s license, and the modest savings of a stumbledore who gives to every charitable effort that asks and throws herself at countless failed projects. I don’t imagine that I have sufficient voice to draw any wrath whatsoever yet still I hesitated until they fired Jimmy Kimmel. Perhaps the haunting of my old Con Law professor finally penetrated the cotton with which I surround myself.

I don’t watch late night television except in short clips on YouTube days after its initial airing. I have no particular affection for Mr. Kimmel, yet the patently retributive termination of his show offends me. Like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel criticized a politician and the politician’s party. He said nothing disparaging about a dead man; in fact, by all accounts, he voiced empathy for the man’s family. His joke about the current American president got him fired, as far as I can tell. Someone suggested that an entire network would be forfeit, so the sacrificial lamb faced slaughter. Make no mistake: Absent contravening facts, that narrative holds water and does not just smack of censorship but stinks of it.

The end of democracy as we know it draws ever nigh. Darkness enfolds itself around us with a hideous grin and an evil snicker. From within its dire embrace, we can squirm, we can writhe, we can moan but our escape will elude us. We must then cast a broad light before the swallow. We must join hands. We must stand firm. This situation long ago stopped being a matter of politics and began its certain morph into a dire situation from which our republic might not emerge. Cancel the network; cancel the subscriptions; follow the writers who speak against this fascistic flow. I still separate my worlds — the artists whose work I sell at the shop need me to do so; the small not-for-profit which I manage must remain apolitical. Challenge to neutrality rises, though, and my world shrinks. I cannot lament any backlash. If I stand for anything, it is truth, justice, and the American way.

Early in the semester during which I took Constitutional Law at the University of Missouri School of Law, the administration sent out a directive that students should no longer be allowed to consume food within the classrooms and lecture halls. The professors had to read the edict aloud to their students. Professor Scurlock did so, in precise tones. We sluggish young folks sensed something lurking in his voice, a reluctance that his clipped cadence could not disguise. He placed the printed page upon the table and faced us. As you know, he began, official curtailment of conduct and speech must meet certain standards to pass constitutional muster. We shifted in our seats. We sensed a lesson looming.

His face remained without expression as he continued. The complete ban of eating seems excessive to me, and so I have reflected on this new rule for some time before I shared it with you. He paused. In my classroom, we do not condone over-breadth of regulation as it violates the constitution which I hold dear. Therefore, during my classes, in this room, consumption of food will be permitted with certain rules that I consider reasonable. We waited. We knew him.

A little smile began to curve his mouth. You may consume food in this classroom. However, in order to accommodate what I assume to be the goal of the overly broad directive, to wit, cleanliness of environment, you must also eat the wrapper.

A few weeks later, a terrible accident put me in the hospital for several months. Professor Scurlock came to see me while my parents visited and my little mother stood to shake his hand. You’re the professor that lets them eat in class as long as they eat the packaging, she remarked. A broad grin filled his face and he replied, Reasonable restraints, ma’am, reasonable restraints. We all laughed.

It’s not funny anymore. The other shoe has dropped. The restraints exceed all reasonableness by more than a tolerable amount as government coerces private actors to aid in its erosion of our freedom. The dubious concept of agreeing-to-disagree cannot be invoked to excuse rank abridgement of the Bill of Rights for the most unreasonable of bases. Vote how you will; advocate the economical principles that you favor. I will, as they say, defend to the death your right to say any damn thing you want — including that the emperor stands buck-naked before you. But when that emperor comes for you, please ask yourself whether you spoke out, and who you watched the goons drag away while you stood silent.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

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)

Until I moved to California, I had drifted through years of discontent without being fully aware. Now, here, in this place, my need for permanence has revealed itself. Yet I live in a house on wheels, the most insubstantial of dwellings, on a lot that I do not own, below sea level on acreage that has seen levees savaged by the rushing waters, the unrelenting rage of fire and earthquakes, and the battering ram of the perennial fierce winds. Still, I crave the solid home that I sold seven years ago to make start the odyssey of my last decades.

When duties abate, however brief the window, I head to the ocean. My river home comforts me, but the Pacific’s voice lures me westward. I cannot camp, or hike, or kayak but I can drive. My car takes me from spot to spot, places that I have visited often enough to have my own memories. Seven years slipped away before I realized the full impact of my move to the Delta.

The Russian River hits the sea just south of Jenner, flowing under the Coastal Highway a half mile south of there. A restaurant sits above the River near the intersection of Highway 116. When I first moved to California, a Russian Club occupied the spot. During the pandemic, you could stop for bootleg tea and sit outside. The silent, somber waitstaff took your cash and brought steaming pots of fragrant brew. Warm eyes squinting over masks signified welcome, even as everyone tacitly acknowledged that none of us should be there.

Now the place has become relentlessly cheerful, sporting a big sign promising real food. The menu clarifies that you’ve come to Jilly’s Roadhouse, where you can get a hamburger, mac-and-cheese, and a few other items that most folks would find hearty, even delectable. I sat by the window and studied the river, before ordering lemonade and the only thing that I could vaguely consider eating, a beet salad with candied walnuts, hold the cheese, and please make sure that the nuts do not have honey. The waitress checked; in an earnest tone, she assured me of my general safety. She placed a plate of sourdough bread and a ramekin of onion jam next to my salad, and quietly withdrew, leaving me to my book and my solemn gaze downriver.

In my first year as a Californian, that half year when I had one foot on the banks of the Missouri still, I drove this way and found myself on a flooded road behind a mudslide. On this Sunday, in mid-August of my seventh year as a California resident, I drove the same route after lunch, heading inland. I studied the stretch of green to the south of the roadway and wondering if 2018’s terrifying floods had enriched the soil. My car filled with the heady fragrance of summer, pine needles, rich earth, and ripening stone fruit. I thought I might be right; I spied a tree that stood in water that day, as I sat in traffic watching roadcrews shovel silt.

Driving home last weekend, I passed through towns clustered on the river’s edge. I pulled into each turn-out as I headed east to let a cluster of impatient cars rush past. I stopped only once, to wander through a roadside sale in Guerneville. There I declined to pay fifty dollars for a brass box that its seller touted as a vintage stamp-roll holder. I guess she took me for an easier mark than I actually proved to be. A patchwork jumper tempted me until I saw its rayon content. I do not need to own anything that requires special care. I considered it, though; before remembering that I only have 21 inches of hanging space already jam-packed with dresses. Surely I did not need another one. No one sees the dozen which I already own with sufficient frequency to spark familiarity.

Miles of two-lane blacktop fell behind me as my vehicle made its way back to the banks of yet another California waterway. I pulled into the park not long before twilight. I tarried, as I nearly always do, listening to the metal of my engine cool. Warm sunlight filled the western sky, spreading its orange glow on the billowing clouds. Hours and days loomed before me, moments when inevitable choices between happiness and gloom would present themselves. A twinge in my chest reminded me of the approaching fortieth anniversary of my mother’s death. Unanswered emails and unopened texts foretold of other obligations, some pleasant, some daunting. Eventually I made my way onto the stairs of my porch, backpack slung over my left shoulder. One Sunday in between barely suffices to restore my flagging soul. I made the best of it, though, then came back home, to the tiny house called Angel’s Haven, where worries and wonder waited beside each other in the gathering gloom of a summer’s night.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Suddenly my feed shimmers with 50th anniversary tributes to A Chorus Line and I find myself overcome with sobs. The past wraps itself around me and I stand in the breakfast room of my mother’s home, begging with her. I am eight; I am ten; I am twelve. The argument repeats itself. I beg. She shakes her head. I cry. She turns away.

I cannot remember the first moment that I wanted to be a dancer but I can remember the hours that I spent in the sunroom leaping across the floor. Each time, I ended in a heap near the sliding door closet and one of my brothers laughed. When Mother got home from work she would find me huddled on my bed, face jammed into the pillow. I might have cried myself to sleep in a calmer household. Most often, I would be clutching the book about dancers that she had given me, stories of Maria Tallchief and Isadora Duncan. The ink on the pages smeared beneath my tears. Eventually, Mother convinced me that crippled girls could not be ballerinas and I stopped talking about my dream.

I sat in front of the computer tonight watching clip after clip of the flash mob in Lincoln Center performing One and What I did for Love. I remembered my vinyl copy of the Broadway show. I played it so many times that the cardboard wore thin and the album would slip through the outer edge onto the rug if I didn’t take care. I closed my eyes and sang with her, the young woman who did not regret what she did for love. Eventually that number became an anthem for every mistake I made along the way. Fifty years later, I will still sing the damn song to myself, in the shower or as I drive away from any failed encounter.

Overhead, birds softly serenade the breeze the cools them and the last light of the day’s sun that has warmed us all. Behind the trellis walls that my friend Michelle built for me, I sit among the succulents and the bougainvillea. I should be straightening the clutter beneath my laundry unit, the chore I had assigned for the evening. Instead I find myself playing version after version of the anniversary flash mob, taken from various cell phone vantage points in the brightness of a New York summer day. I strain to remember if I ever saw a stage production. Certainly I watched the movie, first in a theatre and many times on tape, at home, in one apartment or another, usually after a particularly nasty break-up — though come to think of it, weren’t they all?

If my life had a soundtrack, it would include songs from the musicals to which my mother introduced me. From Carnival‘s “Who Can I Be?” to “Who Can I Turn To?” from The Roar of the Greasepaint. But none encapsulates the roller coaster of longing and emotion that marred my six decades like the bittersweet and sometimes glorious tunes from the heart-wrenching tale of young people trying to make it on Broadway. My mother was right to steer me instead to academic pursuits. She could not have known that nothing would ever take the place of my unending desire to stand in the wings, wearing tights and silk toe shoes, waiting for my cue.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The late morning sky spans overhead. White tendrils trail across the pale blue. I close my eyes and feel my chest rise and fall with each ragged breath. Saturday spans empty and quiet around me, the stillness broken from time to time by a passing car or a suddenly loud note on the speaker outside the shop. I change the song when discordant chords might disturb the neighbors who live over my shop.

I don’t recognize most of the songs playing on the bland channel that I’ve selected. I designed it to draw attention to the business but not offend anyone. As a consequence, the melodies frequently succumb to the noise of a truck on Main Street. The voices rise and fall with little flair. Once in a while, I desperately switch to something with pizzazz and wait to see if anyone notices.

Yesterday my friend Michelle and I drove to nearby Flag City to find good Indian food. We sat in a new cafe that occupies a storefront adjacent to the Starbucks drive-through lane of a little strip mall. Flag City has the best gas prices, a MacDonald’s, a dead Burger King that looks to be reinventing itself as some other chain, and a cluster of businesses. Halfway between Rio Vista and Lodi, its main purposes seems to be as refueling for semis headed to LA via Highway 5.

I ordered pakora and aloo gobi. The aroma took me back to the old Chai Shai just down from my traditional house in Kansas City. Homesickness overwhelmed me as I spooned perfectly cooked rice onto my plate beside the steaming potato dish. For the thousandth time I try to remember why I thought this adventure made sense. When I meet people, they ask why I moved to California. I demure.

The Pacific Ocean drew me, I do not say. I used to speak of my love for the ocean’s song. Every month saw me parked in a lay-by staring at the sea. Now my seven-day span includes three days behind the helm of the dream that I manifested here in Isleton and I do not yet see the fair trade. But I surround myself each weekend with beautiful, sometimes provocative art, and something must be said for the pleasure of that.

I took Michelle home to Isleton after our dinner, driving back into her property amongst the rusty John Deeres and the bits and bobs of a farming life. Wind ruffled the tall grasses in the neighbor’s meadow. As I turned my car towards home, I glanced to my right and caught the fierce glow of a majestic sunset streaming through the clouds above the Sacramento River. A few minutes later, I pulled to the side of the road, first right outside of the town of Isleton, and then on the Delta Loop where I keep my house. I rolled down my window and held my phone outside, angling its lens westward at the ball of fire on the far horizon.

One of the weirdest parts of a wild personal transformation in your sixties involves the human phenomenon of adolescence. In 2017, I began the process of divesting myself of a life that I had spent three decades building. I started the phase-out of my law practice, sold my house, traded my mother-in-law’s Prius for RAV4, bargained a bunch of cash on a tiny house, and headed west. As I sat in the open gateway of a vineyard near the confluence of the San Joaquin and the Sacramento watching the blazing descent of the sun, I could not prevent myself from questioning the last seven years. I’m feeling my teenage years as a revolution. I have no idea what might come next. The crash-and-burn could rival the evening’s glorious sunset, or I could rise from the nourishing soil of the California Delta in a graceful sweep of gold like the eastern light of a cloudless summer morning.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The merest of gestures can shatter self-respect. A hand raised against comment; a slight shake of the head. A sardonic grin. Your voice falls on resistant ears. You tell yourself in turns that you deserve better and that you deserve much worse. Your greedy heart wrestles with a crushed soul that huddles in the unlit corner.

Before I moved to California, I got a pedicure every other week at a salon near my home. I can’t recall the name of the technician who provided this service for me but the same woman waited on me every time because I had a regular appointment. Getting this done did not feed my vanity. My particular mobility challenge inhibits certain acts of self-care; I understand how important one’s feet can be to heart-health, but I also acknowledge that a pedicure provides a certain sense of satisfaction.

Within weeks after I moved, I realized that I would have to find a new salon. Although I could count on being home a few times during that first year, once I finished my cases, I would have no need for frequent visits. With the trepidation of one who firmly believes in her unworthiness for such luxuries, I booked an appointment in Lodi and presented myself for scrutiny.

It did not go well.

The lady bent over my feet and exclaimed in unbridled tones that she did not wish to work on a crippled person. In truth, my ten toes have a few knots and gnarls, mostly the unfortunate result of a spastic gait and hard, unyielding shoes. As I struggled to get out of the chair, a woman approached the area and tried to intervene. Eventually, I let myself be persuaded to stay and the nail tech decided to do the pedicure.

Needless to say, I never returned. I tried another place in town to similar ends, although the woman bending over me took my feet in hand to treat without much fanfare. She voiced her complaints in obvious disgust but in a language that I could not understand and over her shoulders to a co-worker, gesturing to her basin and my offending digits. I never went back there, either. I have spent the intervening years tending to my own feet as well as possible, given my limitations. As for my spirit, it seeks other means of solace.

This week, I have come to St. Louis to see family. Yesterday my son spent several hours helping my sister, and I chose to find a nail salon at which to treat myself to a little pampering. The woman to whom I had been assigned gently lifted my feet into the tub of warm and bubbling water. She smiled and nodded, seemingly not versant in my native tongue just as I had no knowledge of hers. For the next hour, that woman — whose name I never learned — restored both my feet and a small but crucial corner of my psyche. She smiled, and nodded, and even gently drew my socks over my ten toes when the pale pink polish had dried.

As I sat outside waiting for my son, I closed my eyes and let the warm rays of the afternoon light kiss the fragile skin across my aging cheek bones. Later, my son, my sister, our friend Penny, and I shared a meal at a nearby pub. On the way home, I glanced westward, at the blazing sunset. I wiggled my toes inside my shoes, and felt a slight stirring of contentment. It cannot last; it doesn’t stand a chance against the onslaught of trouble in my small corner of the even more chaotic world. But in that moment I could savor its deliciousness, and so I did, all the way home to our Airbnb.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

You might notice a vague shimmer in the center of the sunset. I edited out a roof-top on a building in the bottom of the original photo. The image is otherwise unchanged from how my cell phone saw it last evening.