Monthly Archives: August 2024

What Love Is

Love luxuriates in patience
not slumped in a boudoir chair
asking, Is that what you’re going to wear?
Love clothes itself in kindness
forswearing all but the mildest grumble
quelling every hint of rancor
ignoring even the most annoying habit.
Love exudes humility
never slamming the phone
let alone banging a fist
(love never thrusts a red-faced rant
through a window nor does love
twist words, or scour paragraphs
for a shy hint of weakness).
Love admits error; love does not
insist that the mistaken strategy
should have been the course of action
all along. Love seeks not hesitation
or failure, or fault, or chaos; but
when the beloved takes to the highwire
love falls asleep with the phone clutched
against its chest, so as to hear the text
with news of the beloved’s success
or a desperate cry for help in the night.

© M. Corinne Corley, 2024

I watched this family repeatedly brave the crash of waves together. Pacifica, California, © M. Corinne Corley, 2024.

 

 

Stairway to dreams

This morning I had to traverse the narrow stairs of my tiny house in the first moments of waking, before my brain and my muscles began the daily dialogue that motivates me forward.  I grasped the rail, reminding myself how far from California my son lives, cautioning myself that I had a full agenda for the day, with no scheduled time for catastrophic tumbles.

In my six years of tiny living, I have never fallen down those stairs, nor did I today.  I swung myself around the open corner, tossed my electronic reader on the small cherry table, and moved toward the facilities for the need of which I had risen before the summons of my alarm.  A few minutes later, I stood in front of the two-burner stove top waiting for the kettle to boil, lamenting the vacuous stare of my coffee canister, grumbling about having to re-use grounds because I forgot to replenish my supply of Double Dead beans.  

As I waited, I glanced at those stairs.  My friend Sheldon designed them, making their run a bit longer and their rise just a tad shorter.  Various angel ornaments flank a mirror, hanging from nails unceremoniously hammered into the top plank of the rail.  A long split spans the length of the baluster.  I worry about that split from time to time.  I assume it came from the careless insertion of a deck nail  into green wood.  

When I first designed my house, I had a sleeping cubby on the first floor.  Several years ago, I had a friend tear that out to make way for a little sitting room.  Now I climb that stairway not to sit at a desk and write, but to rest, to sleep, to read as night collects its dark self around me.  The moon descends in the western window as the sun rises over my head.  My house sits too far back on the lot to see the sunrise around the dwelling next to me, but I watch as the light rises in my small space at the head of those stairs.

The water boiled while my thoughts drifted.  I poured the steaming liquid over yesterday’s filter and reminded myself to visit the coffee shop two doors down from our creative collective to buy beans.  I settled in front of the digital NYT with my weak brew, at the foot of my stairway, in my 198 sq. ft. home below sea level next to the San Joaquin River.  I contemplated my day.  After a few minutes, I got up to scramble a couple of eggs and make some toast.

It’s the twenty-fourth day of the one-hundred and twenty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Mad Avowals

A recent email ended with the exhortation that I should keep writing.  Oh, sir, you flatter and frighten me! The correspondent innocently employed a mandate which forever haunts me.  Others have declaimed that I should keep writing, before devolving into avid resentment that writing detracted from the demanded presence of their rueful expectations.  I could not win.  If I do not write, I might as well not exist.  Yet the process and the product became a source of wild controversy as my attention strayed from daily life to the book which I yearned to create.

I have been asked, how can you write so easily? and replied, silently if not otherwise, I have to bribe myself to do anything else..  Passages crowd my frayed nerve endings and yearn to leap across the synapses.  Entire sentences jockey for the flow to fingertips before they can fade.  Anecdotes yammer at the gateway:  Mine, and those told to me by others.  Lofty  imagery of flora and fauna  vies with tales of flotsam, feast, and far-flung places, some seen on Sunday drives and some which I can only imagine.  Tales of tears stand at attention in my mind’s library, awaiting their turn for telling.  All the while, I do my job, earn my keep, pursue the mundane events of a fading life.  I tell myself, when you get this load of laundry done, you can spend an hour at the keyboard, before scrapping the task list in favor of constructing an account of a tender moment that the universe afforded me in the midst of a tumultuous time.

Keep writing?  Of what, to whom?  Speak you of this correspondence, sir; or do you know the mad avowals which haunt me?  I will be present; I will focus; I will listen; and then, as my reward, I will write.  Oh, the chance to write!  More precious than a mountain of gold!

I have stood on the edge of a canyon with my young son and watched a bird of prey swoop across the open expanse, effortless and easy, while I stand breathless and panting from the climb.  Even as I strained to discern the distant slopes, I composed an account of the experience.  I race to the notebook in my car as the light fades across the ripple of the ocean to record the powerful sight of the setting sun.  Does a photographer fight these anti-social urges?  Does the painter?  Is it only because I understand the fleeting gift of the well-formed phrase?  

I write in the shower, in the car, in line at the grocery store.  I stand tapping my silver ring against the cart handle, willing the clerk to work faster so I can get out to the car where I surely have a piece of paper.  When my turn comes, I struggle to recall what I meant to do — oh yes, buy this food! — instead of writing down the metaphor that I might never again recall.  How are you today, asks the cashier; but I can only blankly stare into her face.  How am I?  Rushed, in the main; and torn between my understanding that your importance as a human being surpasses that of the essay that my mind struggles to retain. Mostly I just mumble that I’m fine, and grudgingly accept the eyerolled condemnation of my distant tone.

A high school classmate said she pictured me in my sickbed, wrapped in silk and fringe, a notebook balanced on my knees.  Pages of a novel flutter to the floor in this prosaic scene.  She presumed the absence of meaningful distraction.  Unable to walk, I would not have a life except that of a writer.  Like Heidi’s feeble cousin Clara, I would wistfully observe the rosy-cheeked stronger girl and, thus inspired, write about the life I could not have.  I listened to her happy, clueless prognostications with horror, rejecting the notion of that creepy, vicarious accumulation of stories to recount with the scribblings of my fountain pen.

Yet it is known, and often lamented, that I would rather write than most other things.  What does that say about me?

Keep writing, my correspondent bids me, like one who many painful years ago asked if I would write as beautifully for the rest of our lives.  I recalled that entreaty with a definite ruefulness the first time the same sad soul lamented my inability to stop writing to hear about the events of his workday. 

Keep writingTo you, sir; or in general? I am not sure that I can keep the one promise, but neither am I at all convinced that I can forswear the other in its stead.

It’s the thirteenth day of the one-hundred and twenty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

 

 

Spider Woman

I coexist among a cluster of spiders that occasionally ensnare me in their silky webs.  I stand on the floor of my tiny house and let my gaze drift from one sweep of dusty strands to another, lamenting my carelessness in leaving the cleaning wand outside in last winter’s rainy season.  When I lean against the pillows to read at night, I catch sight of the intricate weavings spanning the space between my window and the small shelf holding mementos.  From within an antique frame, great-grandmother Corinne stands next to her husband, staring at me with a slightly insulted air.  

Spiders kill flies, so I usually let them escape the broom’s wrath.  But their webs annoy and embarrass me.  I can’t have unexpected company, except someone benign and forgiving like my friend Michelle whose six acres south of the town of Isleton harbors many critters large and small.  As she washed dishes in my tiny sink after a recent, impromptu dinner, she smiled with no insignificant measure of understanding as I brushed another sticky mess from my face.  I feel as though I just got rid of all these nasty things, I muttered, though in truth it has been at least a month since my last cleaning rampage.

A few years ago, a neighbor in her tiny house screeched.  I ran over and stood at her door, calling to her, asking if she needed help.  She came outside and sank to her porch steps.  There’s too many spiders here, she gasped.  I replied, Yes, and they’re winning.  She stared at me for a few tense  minutes before a grin broke out across her weary face.  

When I first moved to the Delta, people back home would ask what it was like living in a park.  Exactly how you think, I often told them without any kind of explanation.  In truth, it’s dirty, and windy, and filled with all manner of creatures — coyotes, and voles, and gophers, and a whole slew of feral cats (some descended from a wild female that I tried to adopt two Christmases ago).  Woodpeckers hammer at the tasty cedar of my house’s exterior.  Scrub jays squawk in loud protest if they find empty bird feeders.  Little grey rodents dash across the levee road.  And birds, everywhere:  Hummingbirds and egrets and falcons and hawks; songbirds and finches and herons.  

In 1992, I moved back to Kansas City from Arkansas.  After getting settled, I loudly proclaimed that I had exhausted my capacity for country living.  I shook the mountain dirt from the soles of my Doc Martens and declared myself returned to an urban existence for eternity.  Yet decades later, I closed my law practice, sold my beloved Brookside bungalow, and head west on the heels of my small wheeled dwelling to live amongst in the untamed California Delta.  I do not know what possessed me.  Perhaps the long-ago lover who wrote a poem comparing me to an arachnid had some glimmer of prescience. 

The spiders and I have stricken a sort of truce between us.  They stay out of my bedding and only occasionally crawl into my favorite Frankoma coffee mug to nest or die.  In turn, I swat down only as much of their self-constructed housing as necessary to feel sufficiently good about my housekeeping to have the occasional friend come by for coffee.  The spiders have not exactly accepted me, but once I admitted that they were, after all, here first, the atmosphere got a little less tense.

It’s the ninth day of the one-hundred and twenty-eighth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

In memory of a St. Louis sister

SARA TEASDALE

08 August 1884 – 29 January 1933