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

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®