A customer in the shop today asked how long I have been in California.  I glibly answered, Oh, just a few years, as an explanation for not knowing the location of his home town.  After he paid and left, I found myself frozen for a few seconds, thinking, Six.  Six years.  No.  Six and a half.  

It actually depends on how you could.  My house arrived in November of 2017.  The local propane tech connected a leased tank in early December.  The RAV4, a friend, and I headed west on December 17th, and by New Year’s Day, I had taken my visiting son back to the airport from his Help-Mom-Settle-Into-Her-New-Digs-For-Christmas visit.

I spend 2018 flying to and from Kansas City closing out cases.  I tried my last one that November.  Some time along the way, homeless in Kansas City, I got a driver’s license and became a registered California voter. In March of 2019, two months after my Missouri plates expired, I paid for California ones and officially stopped excusing my intermittent trespass to gawk on being from out of town.

But I associate moving here with winter, with the waning of daylight hours and the turning of the leaves.  I lean backwards and strain for the sight of migrating birds as their ruckus precedes them into the airspace over Andrus Island.  My porch has tripled in size from the original one built before my actual move by a long-gone neighbor.  Having arrived without plants as dictated by the guard at the state line, I’ve acquired a plethora of succulents that thrive despite my hapless care of them.  You might say that I’ve settled into Delta life.

In case it’s not apparent, my nesting tendencies did not abate with my move west.  My walls burgeon with paintings, small shelves filled with knick-knacks, and dangling ornaments.  Like the swell of potted cacti on the wood rails outside, my stairwells boast an accumulation of baubles on haphazardly implanted hooks.  I like a cozy house, though recently an urge to purge has reawakened within me.  I whittle away at a list of tasks prompted by the approach of our yearly open house.

So October comes, and winter looms.  Whether I count my anniversary from my house’s arrival In November 2017 or the fateful day  on which I got my picture taken at the DMV in Vacaville, my tenure here stretches past a half-decade.  It feels too late to turn back now.  My only remaining options take me forward, into the undefined last third of my life.  I do not know what the future holds.  But the air feels sweet and clean on my uplifted face, and I’ve never had more hope.

It’s the sixth day of the one-hundred and thirtieth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

Angel’s Haven, October 2024. Mural by Alex Loesch, restoration by Rachel Warren of Magical Alchemy Designs, Rio Vista, California

P.S.  One small announcement:  I am the official owner of The Missouri Mugwump®.  It’s been a long journey, made more expensive by inadequate legal counsel (resulting in a chance of representation).  But I made it.  More official announcements at themissourimugwump.com in the coming weeks.

The month eases to a close.  As I drove the levee road today, a lone egret rose from a muddy bank beside a silent tractor.  I watched the broad sweep of its wings and the easy bend of its legs tucked beneath its torso.  My car slowed.  Within its confines, I closed my eyes to feel the wind that the bird must feel; the roll of air, the rush of scent; the caress of warmth from the morning sun.  

I lowered the windows.  Gentle sounds penetrated the small space.  A bee drifted through, ignoring the clumsy human straining to keep out of its path.  A few weeks ago, on another road, at another hour, a small bat got lost in my car, landing on the mess of my Lebanese curls.  Panic rose in this city-girl’s heart as we two creatures flailed in the seconds of the unexpected meeting.  Eventually the bat escaped and my heart’s wild beat subsided.  The incident left its impression, though; and I do not tarry long in evening hours.

Winter seems to approach.  Workers raised dust clouds around me as they hastened to finish the harvest.  They tied canvas strings under their chins to secure wide-brimmed hats against their brows, aware that September’s cool evenings with their hint of early rain do not tell the full picture of autumn weather.  Truckloads of tomatoes lumber past, taking the bountiful yield to some faraway plant where it will become bottles of catsup and cans of sauce.   

Eventually,  I eased my foot from the brake,  but not before a memory flashed by, a glimpse of my son sitting on that very ground beside the field of green tomatoes.  I halted again, experiencing once more the rough contours of the irrigation ditch beneath my clumsy feet, watching my boy settle on a mound of dirt to open his pack.  We shared a snack of cold water, fresh fruit, and generous swaths of sunbutter on sourdough bread.  Along with this simple fare, we joined in moments of silence as the sun set over the turbines near Rio Vista.  I can still taste the sweetness of the near-ripe banana. I can still feel the rush of love for which I had no words.

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

When my son arrived on the 29th of August, I thought we had an eternity in which to reacquaint ourselves.  We had an amazing weekend at the Russian River and then returned to my ‘real’ life and his temporarily relocated existence.  Time stood still; time accelerated; I luxuriated in this chance to see my son as an adult and found myself aghast when the seventeen days dissolved into tissue on the floor.

We walked, we talked, we laughed, we cried.  I do not pretend to speak for him.  As for Patrick Corley’s mother, I challenged myself to undertake any expedition that he proposed.  We went where he wanted; watched videos that he eagerly recommended; and ignored my self-imposed limitations.  We went to a park and choose the farthest picnic table.  I eased myself down to sit on rocks adjacent to a lake in the foothills.  I watched birds peck at the cliff in front of me and sank within the folds of unexpected joy.  I grasped the walking stick that my son bought for me many years ago at the Ren Fest and hauled myself from that lakeside, dusty and tired but exhilarated.  We drove an hour so that I, a vegetarian, could eat catfish fillet and hush puppies while he sampled perch and potato salad.  The chef beamed at us.  We felt like we’d gone back to the streets of Kansas City, to a simpler time and a smaller place.

Perhaps we yearned for somewhere that we had never actually been; a place that we only imagined as home.

On the evening before his flight back to Chicago, we cleaned the cabin that the park manager had let him use.  We packed his clothes and personal items.  We stowed anything I had brought for him to use in the back of my car.  We dined on leftover fish and a mushroom frittata.  More words flowed.  Hope danced in the clean corners.  From the southern window, we watched the moon rise and shared a long, silent breath.  

In the morning, we walked across the park to the community room.  A few last introductions happened; a few more conversations unfolded; a few more turns on the gravel road saw the slow, easy step of our feet.  We carried his packs outside and locked the door of the cabin seconds before his ride pulled into the lot behind my car.  He wrapped his arms around me.  He cradled a small succulent in a clay pot in his hand to carry back with him.  Renee opened her trunk and he swung his bags over its edge.  The car door opened. He smiled over his shoulder.  And then, with a backwards glance and a gleam in his eye, he left me standing on the wooden steps of an old park model in a former KOA on the banks of the San Joaquin River.

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

For the last four days, I consumed food that I know, for certain, that my body despises.  At the end of the weekend, I paid the price.  Everything that I should have avoided, I embraced with glee; and everything that I should have sought, I disdained.  I know the forfeit; I suffered it; and I began my work week with no small measure of trepidation.

Otherwise, the launch of my birthday week held joy.  My son landed in California on Thursday.  After a day at the shop, we headed north by northwest to an Airbnb in Duncans’ Mills.  As with many encounters between geographically distant adult children and their parental units, the first few hours lapsed into that delicate dance. 

Will she accept my life-choices? 

Will he begrudge mine? 

Will four days in a studio override any progress made during the three-hour drive?  

Inquiring minds wish to know.

We saw the sunset from ten miles inland.  The vehicle crested the Pacific Coast Highway as dusk rose around us.  We turned north, passing Goat Rock State Park and the defunct Russian Club, the erstwhile location of which boasted a “Coming Soon” banner announcing the impending arrival of a restaurant planning to serve what it modestly described as “real food”.  This provided some amusement and the attempt at a long-winded retelling of my experience at the Russian Club.

I interrupted the narrative to provide verbal navigation three miles inland on 116 to the rental unit.  Night had claimed the Russian River so marveling over its splendor had to be delayed until morning.  We stowed the food, selected our sleeping corners, and wished each other refreshing sleep.  Good night, John Boy.

After breakfast and a couple hours of scene appreciation, we tried for elevenses at Cafe Aquitica in Jenner but one glance at the long lines sent us continuing northward, towards Ocean Cove Bar and Grill where my friend Randy Carey would be idling at the counter with his beautiful wife Kimi awaiting our arrival.   I think he half-expected that I would actually come.   Cell reception eluded us, so only my promise of two or three days’ prior stood to assure him.  When we walked into the restaurant, the hostess asked if she could help.  I sang out, “I’m looking for RANNNNNDYYYYYYY CARRREYYYYYYYYYYYYYY,” and the man himself turned toward the door.  We hugged.  We named names all around.  My boy greeted them; and we all sat for food.  A few hours later, we had been honored to hear the man sing, chatted with his wife, made a few memories, and gazed at the ocean in the distance. 

On Sunday, Patrick and I headed to Goat Rock State Park and the rock that I call the Eyeball.  We walked on the beach.  We talked about driftwood.  I found a sea anemone shell and slipped it into my pocket.  We ate sunflower seed sandwiches, chopped yellow peppers, and fruit sitting on a rock watching small birds glide above the waves.  When we had had our fill, we drove to our little rented studio on the river and enjoyed a dinner that I threw together.

We filled Monday morning with labor — breakfast dishes, cleaning out the refrigerator, straightening the house, and packing.  My son indulged me in a slight detour to check on the sticker which I had placed on a pillar at the River’s End Restaurant.  The wind had claimed it, but I’ve messaged the mother of the young man whom it honors, asking her to send more of the X-in-a-heart that symbolizes her murdered son and Eric, another mourned lost child.  She sends them out into the world so their dead boys can see in spirit all the places that their bodies will never journey.  I explained all this to Patrick as he helped me search the fence posts.

Afterwards, we contemplated our route.  As we drove down Route 1, we gazed at the sea, we stopped for coffee, we admired homes with fabulous views.  Then our mood shifted, and we craved one more grand adventure to lift our spirits.  I told him about the Point Reyes Lighthouse and we hungrily committed to the detour.

I’ve always wanted to walk the half-mile from the parking lot to the Point above the historic lighthouse.  The building itself crouches in the sea.  Visitors cannot climb down and enter, but they can gawk.  On a windy day four years ago, I tried to make the trek but couldn’t bring myself to go alone.  I’ve waited for this day.  Never mind that halfway there yesterday, a car made its way towards us.  The window rolled down.  A rumbly voice spoke: You know you can drive up there if you’re disabled, right?  Every state park, yes, ma’am.

I had not known.  We persisted, though; and my wild heart acclaimed the glory.  We even walked the entire way back, though I struggled.  With pounding heart, dancing tachycardia, and screaming muscles, I made it.  Exhausted, victorious, and grateful, we turned eastward for home.

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

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.

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.

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 writing.  To 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.

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

I am a collector of Amish tables given to me by men with the last gasp of their lingering affection.

One stands at the end of a loveseat in my tiny sitting area gathering dust.  It holds a vase from my neighbor, which itself holds the silk rose bought for me by my son at Disney World in 1996.  Beside the vase, I have placed a touch-light lamp that I never use.  In its shadow nestles the last existing ceramic box made by my friend Alan during a summer three or four decades ago.  I don’t know what lies inside its hidden compartment.

The other table arrives on Monday by way of UPS.  My ex-husband Dennis asked his friend and caretaker to give it to me upon his death.  She has done that.  I don’t think she knows the extent to which my heart contracted when she disclosed its bestowal.  

That table factored in a tit-for-tat, this-for-that conversation that Dennis and I quietly undertook a year or so after he had moved out of my house but before we officially divorced.  He wanted the stand mixer and traded it to me for his two cast-iron pans and his set of aluminum mixing bowls.  I have always thought I got the better end of that deal.  We quickly dispatched of the other flotsam and jetsam.  The Navajo rug that we bought on our honeymoon, him.  The print of the Buffalo River that I gave my first husband, who left it with me, and which Dennis greatly admired, also went to him.  Martini glasses that we acquired at Target, I gladly relinquished.  And so on, and so forth, yadayadayada.

When we got to the Amish table, I pointed out that he had brought it with him from North Carolina.  Ah, but you’ve always wanted it, he reminded me.  True enough, I had laughingly said on more than one occasion that I married him for his Amish cherry table.  It occupied place of  pride in our small entry area from his arrival in Kansas City until that moment more than a decade later.  It held our key bowl, a photo of my parents, and whatever notebook I dumped on it each night as I entered the house.  But I couldn’t keep it.  I helped him carry it to the van without hesitation.  

Two years later, my new romantic partner moved into the house, bringing with him, as fate would have it, a cherry Amish table.  I do not recall whether I told him about Dennis’s one.  But I might have, for upon the failure of our marriage, in half the time, he left that table for me.  It stood in the same place, the entry way to the Holmes house, until I moved to California.

I have been looking for a reason to completely rearrange the over-abundance of furnishings in the 198 square-feet of my tiny house.  When that parcel arrives on Monday, with Dennis’s Amish table shrink-wrapped in its cardboard confines, I will finally have the perfect motivation.  I will open Spotify on my laptop, load a playlist of falling-out-of-love songs, and start cleaning. 

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

Taylor Swift:  “All Too Well” Taylor’s Version

I first met Dennis Lisenby online in a Yahoo chatroom in 1997 in late winter.  He had assumed the guise of a pirate.  I played the Lady Gardenia.  Those persona shaded our early conversations and perhaps drove most of our relate for the next twelve years.

A few months after we first encountered each other, he asked me to visit him in North Carolina.  He sent a photograph so I would recognize him at the airport.  Up until I received it, he had consistently described himself as a twelve-foot giant.  He captioned the photo, “I might have lied”. The bank of lobster cages in the background caught my attention.  I asked my friend Alan, “What’s he talking about?” and Alan replied, “The wheelchair, Corinne; I think he means the wheelchair.”

I won’t try to speculate on the vagaries of our married life, or his deficiencies as a husband or mine as a wife.  I say nothing of any impact he had on my son; I do not speak for Patrick, nor do I tell any part of his story except how I might feel about events.  But I do want to share what I learned from Dennis.

He had sayings that still permeate my own catalogue of truisms.  Life is not for the squeamish, or the faint of heart, he would remind me when I grew frustrated or weary.  In his own moments of peevishness, he’d angle two fingers in the shape of a gun against his temple and spout, Nobody move or the crippled guy gets hurt.  Life strained his resilience, and eventually wore it thin, but for most of the time that we spent together he kept on trucking.  

He would off-road in a motorized wheelchair or an old Blazer or his high-top van.  He kept his martini glasses in the freezer next to the AA batteries.  Every pencil on his desk aligned with the blank pads.  He turned his computer screen off at night.  He folded his socks.  In the first few years of our married life, until an accident set him back a year or two, he changed the oil in his car despite the fact that he had to lower himself onto a flat dolly with a rope wrapped around the door handle.  Why pay someone to do it if I can do it myself, he reasoned.

We visited a neuro-psychologist after an accident that had left him clinically dead for two six-minute periods.  She told us, Look at it this way.  He was brilliant before the incident; now he’s merely bright.  I know that frustrated him, just as that ghastly twelve-month period of dependence on me drove him bonkers.  But he kept at what he could.  We still ate dinner with an atlas and a globe in those days before Google became a verb.  He still wrote sharp, clear technical papers for the team at work, or at least, they assured me that he did.  

In our time together, Dennis built an accessible garden in our backyard to mirror one about which the Charlotte Observer had written back home, with a photograph of Dennis in his manual wheelchair pruning a vine.  He orchestrated the construction of the wheelchair ramp that he himself designed. Years later, after a wild ice storm sent a tree crashing on the 100-year old porch, he paid my first ex-husband to build a new, grand outdoor space.  He had asked me to identify the best carpenter in town, and I gave my honest response.  The two of them spent an entire summer drinking beer in the front yard and complaining about me, more or less good-naturedly.

In the summer of 2008, my son went to Mexico and Dennis took a fateful contract in Ohio.  Alone for the first time in 17 years, I started a weekly missive to a listserve which morphed into my initial blog, The Saturday Musings.  A few years later, from his post-divorce abode in some Ohio town, he sent me an email in which he stated, without pretension or hesitation:  I’m reading your weekly posts.  I’m thrilled you finally found your voice.

Dennis once tried to talk me out of the marriage that he had proposed by telling me that it would turn out badly for me.  He envisioned his own end as it ultimately came, a long slow slide into his last days.  He wanted to spare me that.  Yet fortunately, he acquired a good friend in Ohio who sat beside him in those final hours, and sent his spirit soaring.  Debbie talked to him, and wrote about him, and kept me informed since the hospital had called me upon his admission two days ago.  We’re divorced, I had said.  But you’re listed as his emergency agent, they kept telling me.  I gave them Debbie’s number and then called her myself.  I have never met her, but I believe she helped release his spirit in the final hours.  I walk with her in love tonight.

Life challenged Dennis in ways that he hoped no one else would experience.  He sought solace in destructive forces, and ultimately, they might have hastened his death.    Looking back, I can’t forget or excuse some of the choices he made and the paths down which he chose to traverse that visited sorrow upon me.  But I still think of him as a 12-foot giant — clumsy, perhaps; hurtful at times; and occasionally, a thoughtless destroyer of small villages beneath his feet.  Also, though, his towering stature lifted him above the ordinary, into the heights of the glorious.  He had a certain nobility of spirit that shone through any failings that might have plagued him.  Life gave him lemons, and he grabbed a bottle of gin and put a twist in it, with a touch of vermouth, just a little bit dirty.

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

Dennis R. Lisenby

03/13/1951 – 07/11/2024

I HOPE YOU’RE DANCING IN HEAVEN.

P.S.  I’ve never been so honored as when his friend Debbie asked me to write his obituary, now linked above (click on his name).  She added a few important details, perfecting my draft.  I walk with her in love today and every day in his memory.