As usual my inbox floods with advertisements for Father’s Day.  I squint at the list and worry about my son, but he’s so adept at keeping junk out of his life that he probably does not get bombarded.  I never unsubscribe from anything;  I just don’t think about it.  So they scroll past on my screen — ads for wallets, ties, golf clubs, polo shirts.  I close the lid of my laptop and reach for my coffee.

The shop that I manage has a Father’s Day Sale running.  I fill the Quote of The Day board with tributes to dads submitted by my cohorts.  A couple of regular customers come, and I wish them regards of the day.  They don’t ask about my father, or my son’s father, or anything else except, in general, about my health.   If they had inquired, I could only have said, it’s complicated.

Anna Nalick plays on the Bluetooth outside the store.  I feel myself sway to the rhythm of her passionate entreaty. 

‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable
And life’s like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button, boys
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe
Oh, breathe, just breathe
“There’s a light at each end of this tunnel” you shout
“‘Cause you’re just as far in as you’ll ever be out
And these mistakes you’ve made, you’ll just make them again”
If you only try turning around. . . and breathe. . . just breathe. . .”

I remember sitting on the porch with my mother while she smoked a Kent and drank overboiled coffee from a Melamine cup.  I can still see the tremble at her mouth, still feel the jagged breath she pulled into her chest.  He doesn’t mean it, she mumbled, more to herself than me.    I patted her arm.  I couldn’t have been more than ten.

I don’t write much about my father and I never write about the father of my son.  But today of all days, I think about them both.  Quiet men, each.  Both dropped out of society in their own ways.  My father tied his identity to the two years he spent in Burma, as company clerk to an outfit of muleskinners in World War II.  The Mars Men of Burma, his battalion was called; and there’s even a book about their experiences.  Whenever my father spoke of that time, he got a vague look and his voice dropped low.

My father’s mother told mine that her sons who went to war came home changed men.  As I heard the story, it did not seem to be a positive development.  War is hell, I suppose; and one cannot walk unscathed through the fire of Hades.  I do not speak much of how that manifested for us.  It’s not just my story to tell though its impact on me weaves itself through everything I write.  

As for my son’s father, he  was a musician in Arkansas who built houses by hand and used Japanese draw knives to make the most beautiful cabinetry that I’d ever seen.   My son looks like him, especially in repose.  He inherited his father’s musical talent, his artistic ability, and his gentle spirit.  In other words — he got the best parts of him.  I will say no more about that — again, because it isn’t for me to say.

I never regretted having a child though I wished I could have given him the two-parent picket fence story.  I spent many years helping men get equal parenting rights because I knew how important a dedicated father could be.  When my clients would ask what they should do to make themselves ready for court, I would stare at them intently, gauging sincerity.  The same thing that makes you a good litigant makes you a good father, I’d tell them.  Put the children first.

Today the shop has filled with grown children in town to take their fathers to lunch.  They browse the art and chat about their reservations at the local steak house.  I wrap their purchases and tell them about the artist who made what they’ve chosen.  They stand in the doorway and wait for each other.  They leave me in a stillness broken only by the sound of passing cars and the throb of music from the outside speaker.   

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I raced an egret down the levee road yesterday.  The line of its wide wings caught the airstream  to rise over the path of a crow.  As I slowed for the dogleg next to the inlet where the old crane stood for so many years, the white bird banked and made the turn with me.  I pressed down on the gas and my car cruised past the Stars & Moon Park, beyond Brother’s Island, to the point where I ran out of public road.

I crossed over the slough by Owl Harbor, glancing towards the sun in the eastern sky just in time to see the egret cut over the road and begin a slow glide.  It skimmed the hyacinth and disappeared into the brush between the private part of Brannan Island Road and the public stretch of Twitchell Island.  I lingered until I lost sight of its shadow in the tangle of vines on the surface of the water.

In the southwestern sky, Mt. Diablo rose to keep watch.  A group of farmworkers stopped their work trucks on the road bisecting the fields between the levee and the Sacramento River.  I continued my drive, as the road narrowed and wound in front of houses and worksheds along the slough.  Through the low branches of trees, I could see light hit the pale flowers on the stand of water.    There had been tiny swans huddled between their parents in the undergrowth here just a few weeks ago.  I strained for some sign of them.

Around a curve, I slowed to peer through the branches at a long open stretch of water.  Then I saw it:   The meeting which the egret must have been eager to join, to fly so low, so fast, with such determination.  I glanced in my rearview mirror for oncoming cars, then stopped, shifted to park, and watched.

The group seemed quiet. Once in a while, a bird  would rise from the branches, flutter, and shift position.  Mostly they just held their pose, waiting, still.  A call came from within the trees, perhaps the morning convocation,  summoning  others not yet landed.  Another sound, shriller now.  A ripple moved through the group. 

It was me, I knew; or the sound of my motor.  I had no right; I did not belong.  One of them turned a regal head upon a sinewy neck.  Although I could not see that far, its gaze seemed to hold mine.  Whatever that egret might have been thinking, I took its meaning.  I closed my eyes and worked the gear shift.  A long involuntary breath expanded my lungs.

When I opened my eyes, the banks had cleared.  I studied the unbroken, vibrant green for a long minute; and then continued on my way.  Around the next turn, I saw again the gathering of angels, settling for roll call, unconcerned with the passage of a small human along the levee road.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

When I downsized, I limited myself to 21 inches of hanging clothes and what could fit in six small drawers.  Off-season clothes lived under my bed until a friend gifted me with an antique trunk.  But at any given time, I can boast about 30 hanging items, two drawers of delicates, and four drawers, 15 x 17, filled with neatly rolled slacks and shirts.  

In my traditional home, I started with a narrow closet on the first floor.  When I moved upstairs, I graduated to a walk-in cedar closet.  Eventually, I finished the attic and installed 30 feet of clothes rods and a full-size dresser.  I could find an outfit for almost any occasion.

But I’ve never been a clothes horse.

I can remember standing in my bedroom, facing the small chair in the corner where an impatient date sat jiggling his keys.  As I braided my hair, he glanced at me.  I saw his eyebrows lift.  He asked, “Is that what you’re planning to wear?”

I let me eyes fall downward, grazing my outfit.  “Yes.  . . ” I slowly admitted.  

“Do you have anything else,” he asked.

I turned and looked into my closet.  “I do,” I replied.  “But it pretty much all looks like this.”   I swung my hips a little, letting my dress swish against the fabric of my leggings.  My evening’s companion rose and pushed his keyring into his pocket.  He gestured toward the stairs, and downward we went.  For the rest of the evening, I studied the other women at the dinner party, straining to discern how their attire differed from mine.

My current wardrobe contains two pairs of merino wool pants (one navy, one black); five V-neck, short-sleeve merino tops (grey, blue, pale pink, green, and gold); two long-sleeve V-neck merino tops (teal and pink) and two merino Henleys (weirdly, both yellow); three pairs of merino leggings; and about six dresses of various weights that can be worn nearly year-round.  I have three summer sweaters, three heavy wool pull-overs, four jackets suitable for spring or fall, and  two winter coats.  Rounding out the collection is at least ten pairs of wool socks in two weights and the usual collection of unmentionables.  Stragglers drift in and out, given to me, found in thrift stores, or snagged from Poshmark and eventually donated away.

Chances are that if you see me in something today, you will see a version of it tomorrow.  Every piece fits the body that I currently have.  The colors harmonize.  Nothing swallows me, chafes at the waist, or shows too much skin.  Everything looks like everything else:  Soft, easy, and durable.  I wrap myself in the wool shawl that friends gave me, or the boiled wool fingertip jacket from my sister.  As the weather warms, I layer down or up depending on the climate both indoors and out.

And never, not in the morning, nor in the evening, nor at any time in between, does anybody ask me if I plan to leave the house in the garments with which I have covered myself.  

I love that for me.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

I take Twitchell Island Road to work now because I’ve seen or heard about too many fatalities at the intersection of Jackson Slough Road and Highway 12.  The frequent occurrence reminds me that when I first moved here, I came upon a fatality that had just happened a few minutes before my car reached the intersection.  Tired fire fighters stood protectively over a prone human.  Someone gestured me around the debris.  I drove across the highway with a sick feeling.

In eight years, I’ve seen or heard of probably a dozen deaths at the same spot, possibly more.  I remember an intersection in Kansas City like that, not far from many of the places that I lived or work in my thirty years there.  Some of these road designs invite folly.  But I can avoid it, so now I do.

You reach Twitchell Island Road by turning left over the Owl Harbor bridge at the spot where my road becomes private.  A lazy right turn puts you on one of the most broken surfaces in a county of badly tended streets.  But I don’t mind.  My RAV4 navigates it well and I have new shocks so my body doesn’t feel it much.

Twitchell Island spans to your left as you drive alongside the tangle of hyacinth below the levee.  Water fowl rise from the slough’s surface as the car passes.   I hover between stands of overgrown trees and gaze at them.  A pair of swans; egrets roosting some distance from each other; a heron on the far side, alone in the eddies.

Yesterday I got a clear look at a hawk.  My phone’s camera can’t get a money shot but I did what I could.  I felt its gaze.  The hum of my engine made no difference to it, from its perch overhead.  We sat and stared at one another, a pane of glass and decades of evolution marking the impassable distance between us.  I felt old.  Every ache in my bones sneered; every torn muscle and dry joint made themselves known.  Still I sat, my car idling, the hawk gazing down at me without concern.  

There must be hawks in Missouri but I have no memory of them.  Here they treat the humans as inept interlopers.  They land on our highwires, fluffing their feathers with the edges of the warning signs.  While I navigate the pocked levee at the slowest of speeds, the hawk swoops from the tree and cuts across the sky over the harvested pasture filled with sheep standing head down to the newly mown surface.  I’m left to continue my journey, to the job I must work, and the hours I must toil, and the noise of a small inconsequential town where I must ply my trade.  The hawk pays me no mind.  It has already reached heaven and will soon find another tree from which to gaze on the vibrant expanse of its domain.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Photo  © M. Corinne Corley 2026

The calendar announces that I have been living in a tiny house in Northern California for eight years and two months, if you count my first year when I spent two weeks out of every six  in Kansas City, which I do.  I registered to vote in 2018.  I changed my car registration in 2019 when I no longer had an address to use back home, but only because it was about to expire anyway.

That Missouri plate got me out of a few scrapes during those early months.  An ominous figure lumbered at me from a white pick-up while I photographed a field of turbines.  He demanded to know my business on the private property. I gestured to the RAV4.  I’m from out of town, I asserted.  I’ve never seen windmills like this, and I’ve never seen so many.  He studied me for a long moment before pointing towards the road.  Best get now, though, he said.  We can’t be too careful.  Indeed.  At least he didn’t pull the rifle that I saw through his truck’s back window.

I find myself surrounded with these sensational vistas.  When I drove over Vasco Road to Palo Alto, I cut through rolling hills with row upon row of these tall majestic machines.  When I get to the coast, I gawk at surfers in January, sea lions in March, and hang-gliders in June.  So much space exists here, wide swaths of it, hundreds of miles of rolling hills and two lane highways.   I’ve seen huge rocks just off the coastline on which thousands of sea gulls roost.  I crane my neck to watch majestic formations of cranes cut through the morning sky.

But nothing mesmerizes me like the ships at sea.  I have a thousand stills and an equal number of short video clips of the great vessels making their way through the deep channel parallel with our levee road.  I want to know where they will dock, what they carry, and the names of the sailors who sleep in the berths at night.  I long for a clear sight of the flags under which they sail.  I squint to read their names and then want to know their history.  Most of all, though, I yearn to board one.  I want to walk its slippery surface, touch the metal contours, and feel the hum of the engines as it lumbers eastward, to Stockton, or west to the open sea.

I long to look towards the shore, and find the eye of a lens taking my picture, as I stand on the deck, balanced, sure, and steady.

My mother told me once that as long as I breathed, there remained a lifetime of possibility.  Since I’ve promised to live to be one-hundred and three, I have time.  One day, I will be on that ship, with the wind rippling through my hair and the, salty kiss of the sea caressing my face.  I’m still here.  It can still happen.  Stay tuned.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Photo and video taken from Brannan Island Road, on the California Delta Loop, 09 April 2026

Both © M. Corinne Corley 2026

It is hard to know what to keep and what to throw away when you downsize from 1400 square feet to merely two hundred.  

For many people, a house which is two and a half bedrooms with one and a half bathrooms and a partially finished basement seems small.  To me, the home in which I raised my son felt like a cozy palace.  We had enough room, most years, though I went through two marriages and two divorces in that time, so several years saw us consolidating closets to make room for step-fathers and the belongings that came with them.  

When everyone had left, and I walked the old floorboards alone, I marveled at the clutter which remained.  A mixture of my life and my son’s childhood filled every shelf and drawer.  As the time to sell neared, I panicked and started throwing things into garbage bags to haul to the curb.  Every person that volunteered a few hours of help left with a gift.  I got rid of rocking chairs and televisions that way.  I gave my son’s globe to the electrician’s child, which I later came to regret.  Boxes of books went to the public library’s fundraising sale.  I can admit, with the distance created by the intervening years, that my old secretary might still have a box of trinkets in her basement that I asked her to hold for me.

Here in California, small cubbies hold sundry mementos with which I cannot yet bear to part.  I touch them with a tender hand from time to time.  Tonight, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, I pulled on the brass knob of a tiny drawer and extracted a small plastic egg from its back recesses.  I ran my finger along the red lines of design which my little boy so carefully applied.  

I do not celebrate this holiday in its religious sense.  I have not for many years.  Now that I have been living alone more than two thousand miles from family, I won’t have freshly baked reindling and rich schmarren.  In fact, I will be working all day, in the small shop that I founded in the town which lends its name to my rural address.

Children might wander into the place.  They will read books and play with the toys in our small kids’ zone while their parents study the art on our walls.  Most of the adults will wear finery and mention having had brunch at the Ryde hotel.  They will ask to set their coffees on my counter while they consider the sterling silver earrings, and I will answer that they certainly may.  Several will make purchases.  I will photograph them, smiling, holding framed prints or new cotton hats with their children clinging to their skirts and the hems of their jackets.

At five o’clock, I will take in the signs and shut off the lights.  I will drive my old car between the vineyards over the levee roads to my tiny house, with its crowded shelves and the ghosts lingering on the dusty sills.  No one will have given me flowers.  My son most likely will have called, and maybe my sister.  Before I finish the day, I will water the cactus on my porch and take the kitchen trash to the dumpster.  I will give the little egg one last glance before slipping it back into the drawer, where I expect it will stay for another year.

As the sun sets, I will gaze into the eyes of my little boy, eternally studying me from a faded photograph, taken on Easter, in Kansas City, when he was very young.

Mugwumpishly tendered,

Corinne Corley

The Missouri Mugwump®

Chris Taggart (top) and Patrick Corley

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®