Two men stood at the door to the shop yesterday, seemingly blocking access.  I pulled it open from inside, asking, May I help you?  One turned and gestured to his mastiff, lapping from the metal bowl of water at his feet.  I smiled and signaled comprehension.  

He told me that they had come with a photographer engaging in an effort to document the Delta.  His gaze shifted to someone on the opposite curb, crouching in front of the broad window of an abandoned storefront papered to guard against prying eyes.  He had aimed his lens through a torn spot and seemed to be documenting the emptiness.  

He finds the old buildings to be a fascinating indicia of the area’s decline, the dog owner told me.  I shook my head and turned to the other man, asking if he’d like to come see the art.  No, we’re good, he said, and then the two moved away, I suppose to join their friend with his fixation on failure.

As for myself, I prefer to think of our town as on the upswing.  The pandemic hit this place hard, as it did many small towns.  Artists moved away; businesses failed.  But some endured and others opened, and now we’re the stalwart few, staging a comeback, posting pictures of open signs, each other’s fare, and our own merchandise with clever quips.

Isleton sits in the southwestern edge of Sacramento County.  I spend three days a week here.   Monday through Thursdays, I work in Rio Vista, over the Sacramento River in Solano County.  It feels more generic there but it has fewer empty storefronts and more going concerns.  I cross the divide twice a day, traveling to and from my home.  I live in neither city; instead, I crouch among the eclectic folks who make their homes along the San Joaquin and the Mokelumne on the Delta Loop in RV parks that have seen, certainly, better days.  We call ourselves The Land of Broken Toys.

Now another day has dawned.  I sit on my green metal stool and eat a stale cookie that I anticipate I will regret.  Last night, I laid awake too long wondering why my new neighbor feels compelled to illuminate her porch 24/7/365 (at least, so far).  We have very little crime and mostly just light-fingered opportunism.  A boat might get vandalized or stolen in the slough, but our fifteen-acre park sees little stealth. 

But she might feel lonely.  Perhaps the light that tortures my sleep secures rest for her.  I do not know.  I’ve exchanged only a few dozen words with her, during which she told me what she does during the week and pointedly mentioned that my generator sits a foot over the lot line.  I studied its perch, around which weeds have grown in the five years since we settled it on the old concrete pad of the nearest sewer clean-out.  I told her that I would get someone to move it.  She spared me a crisp nod and went back into her tiny house, leaving me and my friend Michelle to ponder the newest challenge.

Out where I live, everything seems more difficult to manage and, somehow, simpler at the same time.  Is it muddy? Wear boots.  Need groceries?  Check with your neighbors for their list before you head to Lodi.  When we go anywhere, we gauge the travel time not in miles or minutes but in river-crossings.  A deep channel might delay the trip by half an hour or more, depending on your timing.  We sit and listen to our radios, watching for the ship.  Maybe we make a phone call or finish a podcast.  Tourists ogle.   Impatient locals post on social media as though they’ve never encountered a lift bridge before that moment.  Eventually, though,  the vessel passes; the bridge lowers or swings closed; and traffic moves.  It always does.  It always will.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The little boy standing at my feet had dark hair compared with the blond curls of my own child.  He tugged at my jacket and urged me to lean closer so he could talk over the ruckus of the pre-school.

“Mrs. Patrick Corley’s Mommy,” he whispered.  “Can I come over to Patrick Corley’s house one day?”  

I patted his shoulder and smiled, saying that I would call his mother and we’d work something out.  He needed no more commitment to trigger a wide grin.  As the child scampered over to where Patrick stood, I felt a warm flush.  At 36, I had given birth to a golden bundle of unlimited joy.  At 40, I heard myself called something that I considered the greatest honor imaginable.

Mrs. Patrick Corley’s Mommy was not, in fact, married; nor would she ever have wanted to be known by the married woman’s title even when she was.  A devout feminist nonetheless burdened by a massive Cinderella complex, I’ve been a daughter, a sister, a lawyer, an advocate, and a wife.  But being a mother afforded an unshakeable and unexpected sense of worthiness. 

I had endured a difficult 34 weeks to bring my son into the world.  Early in the pregnancy, I learned that I would be a single mother with no co-parent.  Two months later, I found out that I had been carrying twins because I lost one of them.  My dysfunctional body shook and quivered as my uterus expanded.  I went into labor in a courtroom in Louisiana, the contractions intensifying as our pilot made a mad dash for home in a Cessna 206 chased by a spring thunderstorm. 

I went into even more intense labor two days before a scheduled C-section, an experience that I cherished for several hours.  Then I became hysterical, demanding that the midwife end the progression to delivery as midnight on July 07th struck and I realized that the child might be born on his biological progenitor’s birthday.  The midwife gently refused, leaning down to assess the situation and shaking her head.  I kept writhing in pain until she decided that the lack of dilation would necessitate calming the situation until the following day.

Accordingly, at 12:59 p.m. on 08 July 1991, I assumed a new, exhilarating role.  My little boy entered the world unblemished and laughing.  They laid him on my chest and my uncontrollable tears flowed.  My friend Laura leaned over my shoulder with an awestruck expression, lifting one timid finger to touch a breathtakingly precious tiny hand.  I had no idea how I would serve in the new role.  But smiles overtook my sobs as the child made his gentle sounds.  The noises of the delivery room rose unnoticed around me.  I heard nothing but him; I saw nothing but him.  When they gently lifted my child from me to take him for testing, the warmth of his small body lingered along with the heady scent that only a newborn baby emits.

I have never, and will never, forget that moment.  I recall my first words, Laura’s exclamation, the chatter of the doctor and midwife as they counted sutures and scalpels.  The brightness of the overhead lights; the cool touch of the surgical drapes; the smiles of the pediatric nurses:  Everything lives in a heavenly oasis in the otherwise grim swamps of my aging and weary brain.

Mrs. Patrick Corley’s Mommy.  In the three-and-a-half decades since his birth, my son has given me laughter in my darkest moments and wise words in some of my most confused hours.  He called 9-1-1 when I fell; got the neighbor when I broke my toes and couldn’t walk; and dragged a cover into the living room when I’d unknowingly had a TIA and couldn’t drag myself to the phone or my own bed.  I have boxes filled with lovely pictures that he drew in elementary school.  My windows sport laminated birds that he constructed out of crisp brown leaves in kindergarten and notes saying that he hopes I like what he could make for me at Christmas.  A binder holds his story of himself, written in careful block letters and thoughtful sentences.  I cherish it all.

We had some rough years, my son and I.  Decisions that seemed wise at the time proved foolish.  He rebelled in ways that astonished and frightened me.  But we made our way.  For the last decade or more, he’s walked a road of his own, with no guidance from me.  He has drawn from deep within himself to reveal a gentleness that I always saw, and I could not be more proud of him.  I do not know what the future holds for him but I know that he has navigated enough rocky waters with finesse to handle what life gleefully presents.

It is already July 09th where he lives though I have two more hours of his birth anniversary where I am.  I have not spoken to him today but I have confidence that whatever he chose to do, he embraced every moment of it.  I sent gifts, and a card with a dragon on it to honor that pre-school where, long ago, his friend begged for a playdate with my son.  One of my greatest joys lies in knowing that my son chooses his own path and has taken within himself the tools to put one foot in front of the other slowly, surely, and strongly.

I will always be Mrs. Patrick Corley’s Mommy, and I don’t suggest that a grown man doesn’t need his parental unit.  But I stand in the shadows now, watching him soar in the dazzling sunlight.  He might falter, he might fall, he might fail.  But he will always and ever make his mother proud, by the man that he is, by the kindness that he shows, and by the unrelenting grace that he radiates.

Happy birthday, my son.  May you have many more, and may they all give you as much happiness as being Mrs. Patrick Corley’s Mommy has brought to me.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

The high school religion teacher whom I most recall taught us to lie on our backs under trees and gaze into the sunlit branches.  I can’t do that anymore; my back would ache and I’d have to summon help to stand.  But I can tilt my head from the comfort of my porch and scan the oaks for birds.

Scores of them settle as evening falls.  Even more herald the rising sun.  I work on the layout of my little deck and think about mornings in Brookside, with our umbrella maple rising high and wide to catch the sweet rays of dawn.  That maple split in an ice storm one year.  Half of it fell across our porch.  We dealt with the mess, eventually; but the tree remained lopsided for the next decade.  You could see the sunset, filtered through its leaves and streaming through the open air on one side.

Whether I can see the horizon depends on who parks next to me at any given time.  For several years, my view of the western sky has been blocked by a blue tiny house.  But I’ve had an empty lot to the east followed by a small van for just as long, so I could see the dawn from my window if I focused on the skyline beyond the adjacent lots.  Whatever benefit comes from staring into the dappled leaves has inured to my benefit.  My soul stills and my psyche calms.

As I cruise into the last years of my earthly existence, sunrise and sunset become more significant.  Each day that I live brings possibility but now the moments radiate with the bittersweet tang of mild regret combined with gentle hope.  So I take every chance that I can to engage in the Jerry Curran tree therapy, sitting in my twenty-dollar porch rocker, surrounded by ivy and fluttering hummingbirds.  I rock, and I think, and I ruminate.  The breeze dances, the birds chatter, and the squirrel chases its mate.  I do not know if there is a God in a place called heaven but for the time being, at least, all is right with the world.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I own seventeen chairs.  Six live at the art collective which I founded and manage.  One sits at the apex of the bookcase and antique trunk which form a 45-degee angle in my tiny bedroom.  Four face each other on my porch.  Three stand in the sitting room under the dropped loft in which I sleep.  I sit on one at my cherry live-edge table, writing; I dine here, too; and I drink coffee, watch videos, and sometimes, just stare at the curtain.

The mate of the chair in which I currently sit stays folded and slid between the wall of an under-stair cubby and a three-drawer dresser which holds half of my clothes.  That cubby wall forms the right-hand side of a nook in which a small chair straddles a little bench.  I pull them both out to dress and tie my shoes.

In addition to these chairs, I own two stools with folding steps, a large bench that once lived in a pizza parlor, and a cedar chest equipped with a seat cushion.  I have two metal chairs:  One at the shop cash stand and one that I once used in the shop but which migrated to my garden across from a small bench painted bright blue.  Finally, near the store entrance I keep a small wooden bench that we affectionately call “the spouse seat”, where the tired half of any shopping couple can pause to regroup while their enthusiastic other half browses our five galleries.

I am one person.  I can, between my home and the store at which I spend three of seven days each week, seat twenty-six people without anyone feel crowded.  In my home itself, eighteen souls could gather and balance plates on their laps while making small talk.

Once in a while, the pig farmers Tim Anderson and Michelle Bert ride their electric bikes down the levee road to knock on my door.  Ms. Bert takes the blue rocking chair while Tim settles into the gold easy chair which he traded me for an antique platform rocker that Michelle has in her stilt house down the way.  Now that summer has settled on our island, we can instead face each other from the blue porch chairs, though i suspect that Mr. Anderson will prefer the pizza parlor bench.

My NZ friend Moira sat on the loft steps the other day to cut veggies, but then we went outside and ate our salads in the sweet air of the Delta evening.  Yesterday, the other Michelle came to haul away a janky table, and we, too, found ourselves settling for a chat beneath the summer sky.  Once in  a while someone else wanders by:  Tracy, with her friend Regina; the inimitable Tom; a dog-walking neighbor. 

But most often, I sit alone, with a book, a glass of cold water, and seven decades of memories.  I call my sister or my son.  I work a puzzle, drink a mug of coffee, or tilt my gaze upward into the overhead trees, straining my eyes to search for the woodpecker that raps at the bark morning, noon, and night. 

Mostly, I just sit.  Sitting comes more easily when you have enough chairs.  Sometimes, I face the levee road and watch the cars and trucks pass.  Occasionally I turn the other way, gazing at the meadow and watching the humming birds flit through the vines on the trellis.  When the pale pink of the setting sun has faded from the horizon, I go inside, settle into Tim’s chair because I know he will not mind, and open my Emily Dickinson.  If I’m feeling homesick, I pull one of my Kansas City poets from the little table where they all live.  As the light fades, the empty chairs slowly fill with ghosts.  In their quiet company, I sometimes fall asleep, wrapped in a shawl that my friend Paula gave me for my birthday one magical year, long ago.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I sit on the deck of the Airbnb where I have encamped for the duration of my Missouri stay.  The air grows heavy with the threat of spring rain.  From the small settee, I can see a heavy flower pot flanked by bricks balanced on the top of the privacy fence and a china frog that appears to be staring at itself in a mirror.  I’m not mad about it.  With no rental car, and no traveling companion, I find myself momentarily in isolation contemplating the city where I spent the first twenty-two years of my life.

I have already had quite good coffee and an off-menu breakfast at a place down the street with two siblings, a sister-in-law, and an old friend of the brother whom we laid to rest yesterday.  The barista took my peculiar diet in stride to create a vegan, gluten-free  sandwich and served it to me despite her obvious desire to make it fancy.  The others got egg bites, bacon-and-cheese sandwiches, and a shared cinnamon roll.  We all had strong coffee.  The entire affair felt very Midwestern.  At one point, I closed my eyes and let their slight twangs wash over me like cool water in a southern Missouri stream.

I’m staying in a converted stable.  The couple who owns it lives in the big house next door, on an immaculately gentrified city street in south St. Louis.  This place is just four blocks from my brother Frank’s home and a scant half-block from the park in which we gathered yesterday.  The grime and glitz of the city meet and mesh here.  Tall trees rise above the lingering scent of exhaust fumes that drift over from Kingshighway.   

Yesterday I rode past the university at which I misspent the shank of my teen years.  The bars where I drank closed years ago, I’m sure, but others have bloomed to replace them.  I got a Bachelors in psychology with a minor in poli sci by dint of counting credits to determine what my major could be after I dropped out of the education department.  I had enough psych classes to finish a semester early, the deciding factor.  The heavy weight of alcohol consumption threatened to destroy me.  I knew I had to leave town or risk a further decline from which I might not return.  I took my degree and fled to Boston.

Less than a year later, I huddled in a corner of my mother’s car for the return trip, rescued by my oldest brother Kevin.  Everything I owned fit into the back seat except a metal rocker, which we crammed into the Maverick’s miniscule trunk.  I would start graduate school a few months later; then law school; and eventually, bludgeoned my way through three decades in Kansas City from which my son can be said to have been the best souvenir.   Ten years ago, my world crumbled into shambles around me and I ran from the Midwest again, this time west to California where I seem to have finally cobbled together some kind of life.

I didn’t mean this trip to focus on me, or revisiting my past, or contemplating the choices I have made.  I came to stand with family by blood and by choice as we acknowledged the passing of my brother Mark to whatever existence follows the human experience.  I sat between his daughter Emily and my brother-in-law Larry as Frank read poetry, his own and one by Maya Angelou.  Between the recitations, he spoke to Mark, to his memory, to his virtues, to his gifts.  I listened with a focus that I did not anticipate.

At one point, Frank asked us to think of our own connection to Mark, how we remembered him, what he meant to us.  I did not see him during his last illness despite twice coming to town for that purpose.  So I have no knowledge of how he looked in his declining months.  I remember him as tall, and silent, and strong.  I found him a bit intimidating for our entire lives, though my response probably says more about me than him.  

I did not cry until Frank invited us to take a rose and put it into the ground where Mark’s ashes would be interred.  I could not stand; I gave my rose to my cousin Kathe and remained frozen in my chair, terrified of the wave of emotion that overtook me.  My grief transcends my brother’s death.  It extends to my life, my solitary existence, the messes that I have abandoned time and time again. 

Later, as I watched a hundred people mingling in Tower Grove Park, sharing stories of their friendship with my brother, I felt myself withdraw into some kind of fog — a fog from which I did not quite know how to extract myself.  

Afterwards, I went to an early dinner with my son and his girlfriend.  The gloom dissipated as the pleasant interlude unfolded.  I shook away the darkness of my self-absorption as we chatted over curated drinks and artfully prepared dishes.  By the time they brought me back to this lovely retreat, my sense of homecoming had returned, along with a strong sense of the gentle side of my brother Mark’s spirit.  A kind of ease settled on me; I slept better than I had in the anxious hours of my first night here.  I carried that peace with me to breakfast today.   I cling to it still, here, in this charming studio, on a lovely street, in the old enduring city of my childhood home.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Bricks and plant in a simple arrangement.

Frog and mirror,

The grey Sunday sky.

I come from a long line of amazing mothers.

My father’s grandmother bequeathed me the name that I bear today but I never met her.  She moved to St. Louis after her husband died in New Orleans and lived with her married daughter and son-in-law in Millwood, a small unincorporated area in West St. Louis County.  In photographs, she stands tall and a bit grim, behind the groupings of her grandchildren.  But on a shelf in my tiny house, I have a photo of the young married Corinne Hahn Hayes and her new spouse, looking sweet and hopeful. 

Her daughter Beulah died during my sophomore year of college.  I recall her as a  grande dame,  an elegant lady who took control of the family business after her husband’s early death in 1945.  She kept her many children afloat and launched most of them to successful careers.  She sent us matching pajamas and boxes of food at Christmas.  She serenely graced the head of the table while her maid served us tiny individual boxes of cereal when we rode the bus to her apartment in the city.  I have no photographs of Grandma Corley, but somewhere in my jewelry box, I have a cameo that must have been hers.  I used to have a string of gold beads from her but they broke and I lost them years ago.  She once mentioned, in my presence, that her sons who went to war had come home quite different than they left.  The set of her face told me that the change had not been for the better.

We spent most of our childhood with my mother’s side of the family, nurtured by her Austrian mother  Johanna Ulz Lyons, and grandmother, Bibiana Ulz, whom we called Mom.   These resilient women twinkled and smiled when we visited but had backbones like steel girders.  They, too, carried the weight of their broods, cooking, cleaning, holding the hands of crying children, and seeing to the family finances. 

Nana had a successful run as an area representative for Montgomery Wards before starting a hearing aid business with my grandfather.  She taught me to sing in a low voice, to boldly relax on the porch in a nightgown after sunset, and to make my bed “as tight as a drum and as neat as a pin, so one could bounce a quarter off of it”.  I’ve lost that last art, to be honest, but I often sit outside late at night wrapped in a  robe.  I drink tea and think of Nana in her nylon slip on their back porch in Chatham, Illinois, quietly rocking in the dark as the summer breeze carried the scent of newly mowed grass across the yard

The legacy of these women simultaneously haunts and comforts me.    From the first moment that I laid tearful eyes on my baby boy, I dreaded failure.  No matter how I strained, I could never quite get everything as right as I remember experiencing motherhood during my own childhood. I made schmarrn as my mother and grandmother had done.  I cooked casseroles and read his favorite books and taught him to ride a bike.  We took trips and played soccer and did volunteer work together.   I filled his glass piggy bank with pennies, a piggy bank just like the one that I had as a child.  I took him to Disney World and the zoo and to Chicago to meet his aunt and cousins.  

I do not know if any of it made a difference.  Did I create enough sweet memories of childhood for him to cherish?  I do not know.  I might never know.  I admire the man that my son has become, but most of that came from his own effort.  I know him well enough to know that he would thank me for what I got right and forgive me for the mistakes.    Forgiving myself comes less easily.

We live far apart these days, him in Chicago and me in California.  He calls often, and we speak of small things.  Anything larger has already been said and needs no further elaboration.  Being the mother of Patrick Charles Corley has been the best and most cherished gift that the universe could ever have given me.  I only hope that I did him justice and did not disappointment him too much.  I know that the women who taught me themselves had flaws. I feel certain that they regretted choices along the way.  In the end, all of us just put our best feet forward, one step at a time, walking each other home, with love, in gratitude, and always in the hope that we contributed something beneficial to the legacy of which we are an everlasting part.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Me and my mother

Lucille Johanna Lyons Corley

Me and my son

Three sets of mothers and sons doing volunteer service one Christmas

Mom Ulz (background), Nana, and my sister Joyce