I made the decision to move to California without asking anyone’s opinion of the plan.  Of all the people most impacted, my son has said the least.  I don’t often write about him anymore; he asked me not to do so and I try to respect that.  But thoughts of him both haunt and embrace me, in turns.  

Yesterday I felt a fire to get chores done.  I started early with an interview for the upcoming event at the community in which I live.  Then I launched into household tasks, before driving into Lodi to get prescriptions, make a Goodwill donation, find new textiles for my sitting area, and buy groceries.  An incredible sense of accomplishment flowed through me as I loaded bottled water into the car and turned towards a gas station.  

I asked the Google lady to play John Prine for me.  Of all the famous folks who died of Covid, his passing hit me hardest.  True enough, I had no personal connection to him but his music has always moved me.  When I learned that he had died, I texted my son in Chicago.  Some kind of grief overwhelmed me as I walk down the roadway of my community under a dusky sky.  My musician son and I texted our mutual sadness for a few minutes before I walked up the hill to photograph the sunset that evening, still cloaked in that poignant sorrow humans feel upon the death of someone famous whom we suspect might have been worth knowing.

As I pulled out of the parking lot at Sprouts yesterday, the strains of Summer’s End filled my car.  Tears rolled down my face.  My brother Stephen’s face rose before me, a loss to addiction and unchecked mental health issues.  I thought of my friend Laurie’s son Steven, another tragic death by suicide, a beautiful soul who succumbed to unfathomable demons.  My own struggles with prescription drugs seem like a distant past which I know contributed to the mess that I made of my life in the last ten years.   I thought of the airplane bungalow in Brookside, Kansas City, where I raised my son and which I sold to make this move.  I could not stop sobbing.  I strained in vain for a sentimental prayer with which to console myself. 

I have no home to which my son could return to find solace, assuming that house would have ever been a safe haven for him in adulthood.  John Prine’s images mixed with my own memories: of love and loss; of mistakes and victories; of grief and joy.  I pulled into the gas station and let my head fall onto the steering wheel.  Then I crawled from the car and started filling my tank, briefly smiling at the man behind me who had spared a concerned glance in my direction.  

When I got back into my vehicle, I started the music again.  Another song; another haunting metaphor.  I drove towards my island with the windows open wide to let the healing autumn breeze surround me.

It’s the twenty-sixth day of the ninety-third month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Turbines at Sunset, 07 April 2020, c. C.Corley 2020.

Good evening.  For the first time since I came to California, I shared a Pacific coast weekend with a friend.  I’ve been to the Bay with my son, my sister, and my friend Kimberley.  But never, before this weekend, have I had company on one of my sojourns to the sea.  This weekend, my friend Tracy joined me in a stay in Monte Rio, a drive to Ft. Ross in the fog, and a slow trek down the coastal highway including a pleasant picnic in a casual layby. 

I cannot say that I made a good companion, but I do think it’s possible that one day, I might become civilized.  It remains to be seen if an old dog such as myself can learn the new trick of opening my world to the eyes of others.  As for Tracy, she cooked meals for us, served as driver, and kept me laughing even when I struggled to walk on the slippery sidewalks and precarious pathways.  As usual, the song of the sea soothed me, and I returned to the Delta determined to put my best foot forward into the new week.  

It’s the nineteenth day of the ninety-third month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Please enjoy.

I stood on my porch last evening gazing at the waxing crescent of the autumn moon.  Earlier in the day I had chanced to talk with a friend about a mutual acquaintance’s  impending move.  My friend said the moving person would be happy in the new neighborhood.  Available shopping in high-end stores; the hustle and bustle of a city; all the modern conveniences and amenities would be available.  I nodded and smiled.  Later, with my face pointed skyward as the dusk settled around me, I contemplated finding happiness in the aisles of a department store.

I turned and looked into my tiny house.  In front of the wicker cabinet sits a 16 x 16 x 16 box which came via UPS on Friday.  My sister Joyce shipped it for me.  It contains the remnants of my Kansas City storage unit, not counting several boxes of things-from-home and three trunks (cedar chest, Boy Scout, Cub Scout) taken by my son in this final purge.  My sister and I packed the box while standing in the parking garage of our old doctor’s office in Clayton, next door to the Office Depot at which I purchased the box.  My empty suitcase stands beside the unopened collection of pictures and mementos.  

I don’t know what I’ll do with these last items.  Having them will not increase my happiness, but as I sorted through a rental car filled with the detritus of my midwestern existence, I clung to this last boxful.  In a while, I will slit the packing tape and begin to sort through the memories.

On the Sunday before Labor Day, my sister Joyce and I went to the cemetery where our parents and brother lie in eternal bodily repose.  I suppose an atheist would scoff at this tender ritual.  But making the visit suddenly seemed important to me.  We stood in front of the headstones.  Joyce leaned down to pull at the overgrown weeds.  I took a few snapshots and then, typically, tripped and fell on the cemetery ground.  As I hoisted myself on a neighboring tombstone, Joyce loudly castigated our father for reaching out to topple me. 

“Oh no,” I assured her.  “I think it was Steve, just letting me know he saw me here.”  We laughed and made our way back to the car.

From there we drove to our old house.  Empty. boarded, and unkempt, it stands forlorn on a street that seems decidedly worse for wear.  We hovered in front of it, Joyce leaning back while I took a picture through the window.  I could not stand the sight of the unmown backyard and sagging roof.  I started the car and accelerated away from the sorrowful scene.  We wandered the neighborhood for a pleasant hour, stopping the car in front of house after house to talk about the people whom we knew in childhood.

After I came inside last night, I uploaded and  studied the picture of my childhood home.  It reminds me of the house where I raised my child. I sold that house in December of 2017 and have not seen it since I turned the keys over to the buyer.  I can picture it, though; after all, I lived there for 25 years.  As the moon rose over the park in which I live, and darkness gathered around me, I assessed whether living in either of those houses made me happy.  I don’t think so.  I carried a certain deep malaise from home to home for many years.  The ready availability of shopping centers could never remedy the paucity of inner peace.

The moon posed for a pretty picture last night.  Its craters and the shadowy contours suggest the kindly Man in the Moon of a favorite childhood book.  I read the book to my son in his babyhood, a tattered copy that came from home with me when I moved away during college.  The Man in the Moon reads bedtime stories to the restless, wakeful Star Babies.  The stories teach lessons based upon the reported antics of the little stars in the nighttime sky.  I studied my photo, looking for his kindly gaze.  I fancied he winked at me.  I took the pleasant thought to bed and fell asleep with a smile on my own weary face.

It’s the twelfth day of the ninety-third month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Hover over each photo to see my captions.  If the slide-show stops, click on a picture to jump-start the action.   Please enjoy.

At 10:45 a.m. on Wednesday, 01 September 2021, I said goodbye to my life in Kansas City.  The only witness to the passing of an era greeted me from behind an industrial four-wheel dolly with a cheerful smile.

“You’re the lady lawyer who moved to California in a tiny house, right?” he asked, as we took the elevator to the 3rd floor.  I admitted as much.  “You used to have an office not far from here and then you shared an office with that nice lady lawyer in Independence, right?” He grinned.  

I asked his name, and he told me he was Dane and that he lived in the same house where his parents had raised him.  As he loaded my ten boxes onto his cart, he explained that his father had died a while back and his mother needed help with her florist business at first.  He stayed around for the company.  “Slinging flowers is hard work,” he told me.  “But my mom loves it.”

He bent to put stickers on the last vestiges of the Corley Law Firm, which he would ultimately haul to join the other fifty or so boxes in the records storage facility.  “These are good boxes,” he observed.  “From the old owners.  I worked for them.  A lot less paperwork but I never got a raise.  Now I make good money but there’s a lot of paperwork.”  He shrugged his shoulders and started filling out a form.  Then he scanned the labels and had me sign, twice — once on a digital panel and once on the paper.  He spared me a rueful smile and said, “See?”

We walked together to the elevator and down to the storage center entrance.  I had advised him to stop outside the gate, due to construction which rendered the exit impassable for a heavy van.  My friend Sheldon learned that lesson on the previous day.  Dane and I stood at the gate, talking about road construction, the changes in Kansas City, and life.  Then he solemnly shook my hand and told me to enjoy California and to let them know if I needed anything.  I stood by my rental car and watched him push his dolly toward the van and load my client files into the back.  He turned and gave me a little wave.  Nice man, that Dane.  Probably his parents raised him well.

I had dinner that night with Paula Kenyon-Vogt and her husband Sheldon.  The two of them give me hope for the world, with their rosy cheeks and their easy manner with one another.  I had culled out two bags of trash, standing at a make-shift worktable that my dear friend Kimberley Kellogg set up for me in her parking lot.  I asked Paula if I could buy an extra trash sticker and put the bags on their curb.  “Buy?  What is this ‘buy’?” she replied.  “Are we your friends or not?  You can put your trash on our curb.”  That might be the new gold standard for measuring friendship.

At dinner, we talked about the pandemic and Paula’s work as a home infusion nurse during this challenging era.  Then, to my great delight, I learned all about fantasy football which unbeknownst to me, Sheldon has played for fifteen years.  We talked about their daughters and my son; and their grandson who has turned out to be an incredibly smart, kind, young man.  The glow of their love suffused itself around me.  I left adrift in the calmness that the two of them exude.

In the morning, before heading to St. Louis, I met Genevieve Casey for breakfast at a snazzy new place in Westport.  I can’t do justice to Genevieve.  She’s fifteen or so years younger than I am, but if I could be Genevieve when I grow up, I would.  She displays qualities that I admire from afar:  Empathy; compassion; creativity; and kindness.  Her beautiful soul shines in every photograph she takes, in the conversations that she holds with people, and in the work that she does as a counselor.  She and Paula K-V have similar auras, I think; whatever color shimmers for the truly beautiful among us.

I said goodbye to Genevieve, to Kansas City, and to the remnants of the life that I began here in 1980.  I interrupted that life to spend five years in Arkansas between 1987 and 1992, returning with a ten-month old.  Now that baby has turned 30, owns a condo, and fights for workers’ rights in Chicago.  

That young man, my sister Joyce, and my brother Frank hosted me at lunch on Saturday in St. Louis.  They chose a vegetarian restaurant for me, because I mostly eat plant-based (with the exception of eggs, butter, and the occasional fish, because, I live near the ocean).  Joyce orchestrated most of my four-day visit to the city of my birth and where I lived for most of my first twenty-five years.  We had lunches, and dinners, and gooey butter cake.  We drove to the cemetery where my parents and my little brother are buried.  We cruised Cherokee Street and held a private boycott of a Greitens-supporter’s antique shop.  

A new friend, Beth von Behren, met me for breakfast on my actual birthday.  Our conversation  seamlessly resumed where we had left off at our first meeting in California four months ago.   Beth has known my brother Frank for three decades.  She and I only connected this year, but I feel as though we’re kindred spirits.  Both writers, women living alone, and “of a certain age” but not yet willing to assume a rocking chair and watch the world flow by our porches.  I like her.  She’s got spunk.

My son and my sister and I did the Central West End for lunch today.  My old stomping grounds looked the same, and yet, I know they have changed.  For one thing, the Puma no longer lives in a three-story house on Maryland.  Joyce Kramer retired and decamped to Florida, where she lives in a high rise with 400 folks.  Once in a while she calls me, her New York accent unabated from her many years in the Lou.  Talk about spunk — she invented the stuff.  St. Louis lost a good one when she moved south.  

Most of the restaurants and stores in the CWE have new names and owners.  We walked a block or two in search of an open place and finally got Thai food in a storefront that surely was something else on my last visit.  Over noodles and curried soup, we talked about politics, pickling, and pets.  Then we took Patrick to his Soulard AirBnB, and Joyce went home to St. Peters.  Now I sit in the fading light in the basement apartment that I rented for my visit, surrounded by precious adornment hand-made in India:  Ornate wall hangings, embroidered bedspreads, jewel-tone paintings, tassels, golden globes hanging in the corners.  

In the morning, I will drag my suitcase out to the rental car and make my way to Lambert-St. Louis Airport.  By and by, the plane will rise into the summer air. Missouri will fall away beneath me.  I will head west, to the life that I began making for myself on the far edge of the country.  I will close my eyes and say a silent prayer.  I will leave the past behind me, in this flat Midwestern state.  From time to time, I will return.  But when people ask me, From where do you come, I will smile and tell them, California.   I’m coming home.

It’s the sixth day of the ninety-third month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Before I let you go:  If you are on Facebook, please consider donating to my Birthday Fundraiser for Rose Brooks Center.  You can find the link HERE.  If you want to donate but do not wish to use Facebook Donation, you can give at their website HERE.  Thank you for supporting this worthy cause.  Now please, enjoy a few photos of my birthday trip, in the below-linked gallery.

This gallery might move slower than you expect.  Please be patient.  Hover over each photo to see my captions.  Please enjoy.