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.

My eyes ache from straining not to cry. At some point this afternoon, I realized that the only child to whom I would ever give birth turns thirty-three on the morrow.  Over two thousand miles from the Airbnb in which I sit, my little boy lives his life in a city condo just blocks from Lake Michigan.  I can hear his voice; and with a strain on technology, I can see a blurred image of his face.  But I cannot hug him.

I spent the day fooling around here and there on the coast.  I fixed breakfast in a rudimentary kitchenette and then took myself to the Chit Chat Cafe.  My son called as I circled the block looking for a parking space.  As with most of our conversations, we touched on both light and deep subjects as car after car tarried by my window.  They gestured; I shook my head; they drove past.  Eventually, we said goodbye and I walked towards the cafe.  

A young man crouched on the sidewalk.  Before him, an array of paintings formed a square.  I watched as he started on a new piece, with spray cans and a bent paper cup as a guide.  He made thin lines with the tines of a plastic fork.  As I stood there, a group ascended the stairs to the cafe and one man said to another, “Are you here for the chit-chat or the coffee,” and the artist met my eyes.  We both chuckled, softly, simultaneously.  

Did that sound pretentious to you, I asked.  He smiled.  I don’t think he’s from around here, he allowed.  You can tell.  The tourists make jokes about things we don’t necessarily think are funny.

I told him that I liked his work.  He said, Please, take one.  I demurred.  I’d want to pay you for it, I said.  He shook his head.  You stopped and looked, he remarked.  That’s payment enough.  Many people walk by like I’m invisible.

I picked two, one to send to my boy in Chicago, and the other for my friend Rachel.  I handed him a bill from my wallet and he thanked me.  We chatted for a few minutes.  He told me he had been named for his Mexican grandmother’s surname, Cruz.  It means ‘cross’, he told me, just in case I might not have known.  

I took his works back to my car.  As I returned, three women and their dogs stood in front of Cruz, who had selected a painting from the sidewalk and handed it to one of them.  She thanked him and continued along the path, as I climbed the stars to the Chit-Chat Cafe, where a smiling barista made me a truly superb Americana.

It’s the seventh — but somewhere, two thousand miles from here, the eighth — day of the one hundred and twenty-seventh month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

The wonderful Ms. Ruth and the stalwart Demi offered to work the shop for me.  With a long-awaited Stanford appointment scheduled for Monday, I had to be on the coast — or near enough — so I took myself out to dinner in Pacifica.

My Airbnb host recommended the place, mostly for the view.  He steered me right on that score.  The food claimed to be Peruvian, but I’ve had better 2500 miles due east in old Overland Park, Kansas.  But one glance out the windows as I approached my deck-side table delighted me.  Such majesty we do not have in the Heartland, and never will, unless I can get some traction on my idea to flood the plains between Topeka and Denver.

Bland food and spotty service could not mar my pleasure at gazing over the ocean.  Not even the sad little ramekin of half-inch wide packets of generic iodized salt (3 to a customer, since Covid, ma’am) rattled my calm.  With a book and a cold passionfruit drink, I occupied that chair for more than an hour, nibbling on the under-seasoned quinoa that had been touted by the server as “basically Peruvian fried rice”.  Neither fried nor particularly tasty, nonetheless the cold dish came home in a box with the similarly boring plantain chips.  I’m frugal even in my excesses; besides, I have salt in the cooler and that dish will warm nicely in the microwave for tomorrow’s dinner.

My hosts left the windows open.  Cool air tinged with fog drifts through the room.  Pleasant paintings of beach scenes adorn the walls.   The sight of them pleased me; most of these temporary digs have boring prints or tourist posters.  The husband of my host couple described the suite in which I’m staying as having been designed to house his visiting parents in their early retirement.  He looked a bit wistful as he admitted that they don’t come much these days.  His mother did the paintings.  She has a deft hand and a keen eye.  I can hear the song of the sea as I gaze at them.  

Tomorrow I will make breakfast in the tiny kitchenette, toast with avocado and some nuked scrambled eggs since there’s no stove-top here.  I brought my own coffee.  I forgot to ask if the tap water drinkable but I’m going to take my chance.  I had to park a half a block down the hill, and I didn’t feel like hauling the jug of water that we Delta dwellers always seem to have in the back of our vehicles.  

With a full day between now and my reckoning with Stanford’s Infectious Disease department, I should be rested for the drive into the city.  My spirit will certainly have quieted.  I already feel that sense of homecoming that my Pacific always brings me.

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

The woman two doors down stopped on the way back from the ice machine to check on me as I fumbled with the rusty lock of my door.  You all right, hon, she said, in the gentle voice that strangers use when they want you to know they mean no harm.  I told her that I was, in fact, all right.  She gestured toward the last lingering rays of sunset.  It don’t get better than this, am I right, she asked.  I assured her that I agreed.  She bid me good night and walked on by just as I got the door open.  

The room afforded about as much space in one square as my rectangular tiny house, though with substantially fewer electric outlets.  I laughed, remembering the absurd argument with my carpenter over why on earth one short crippled woman needed outlets every six feet.  I had to throw my meagre weight around to get USB ports in three of them.  

This place has a decent walk-in tiled shower and something my house lacks, a flush toilet.  My composting toilet spares me having to deal with a black water line but  poses other challenges.  Here everything seems new and well-maintained, better than I remembered from a prior visit.  It will suffice for the next forty hours.  I don’t even mind that the restaurant closes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, something I had never had reason to know.  

I stay here almost exclusively for the soothing voice of the Pacific.  Her song comes to me over the noise of a neighboring television and the occasional slamming car door.  I didn’t have to come west after my six-month oncology check-up.  I could have driven home in rush hour.  I could go home tomorrow.  But I didn’t and I won’t.  Instead, I will spend two nights here sandwiching a delicious, beautiful day at the edge of the world.  My soul has already eased into neutral.  A kind of quiet has overtaken me.  I realize that I have been inland too long, too many days between sojourns at the sea.  My seven-day workweek has kept me from this respite.  

But I will not think of that now.  I sat on the hood of my car, feet on a rock, and watched the sunset.  A vanload of travelers climbed the sea wall beside me.  One of them, a young woman, lifted her open hands to the heavens.  Seagulls and pelicans skimmed the rippling waves.  A middle-aged couple wrapped their arms around each other.  As the golden orb slowly sank into the ocean, we released our breath as one.  Tension rose from our bodies and drifted toward the horizon.  The whole lot of us stood in the parking lot.  No one spoke.  Only the song of the sea broke the silence.

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

Sea Longing

A thousand miles beyond this sun-steeped wall
Somewhere the waves creep cool along the sand,
The ebbing tide forsakes the listless land
With the old murmur, long and musical;
The windy waves mount up and curve and fall,
And round the rocks the foam blows up like snow,—
Tho’ I am inland far, I hear and know,
For I was born the sea’s eternal thrall.
I would that I were there and over me
The cold insistence of the tide would roll,
Quenching this burning thing men call the soul,—
Then with the ebbing I should drift and be
Less than the smallest shell along the shoal,
Less than the sea-gulls calling to the sea.

— Sara Teasdale

Sleep often eludes me.  Last night, I lay for hours resisting tears with my shuddery legs ignoring every exhortation to quiet.  Regret for a late-evening sugary snack clenched my shoulders.  Whether that half-cup of granola really caused the distress or not, I blamed myself.  The endless litany reverberated in the darkness.  My mistakes haunted me: eating too late, reading too long, making each and every blunder that brought me to the long stretch of wakefulness with cold air penetrating my nerve-endings.  

I headed into Isleton too early.  I forewent my usual scrambled eggs, hoping that the coffee shop ladies would come through with my little sandwich at lunch time.  Preparations for the weekend’s street festival engrossed me.  Off and on throughout the day my body rebelled.  My legs buckled.  My knees gave way.  Fatigue settled in my belly and curdled even the perfectly prepared tiny sandwich that I usually love.  I tried to persevere.  I stayed silent when I might have snapped.  I smiled when I wanted to cry.  I shook hands with a couple of guys who made our tiny town one stop on a paddle-board expedition from Sacramento to San Francisco.  I photographed a newly engaged couple, the woman wearing a sunhat crocheted by one of our vendors.  Her radiance almost salvaged my mood.

One of my creative cohorts at the shop started the day by spending two hours helping me rearrange.  Another ended the day by hanging a curtain for me.  Yet I still crossed the bridge on my way to the grocery store with bleary eyes and a sagging heart.  I’m always tired but today’s level of exhaustion overwhelmed me.  My quick spin up and down the aisles could have been painless, except that the store insists on keeping small specialty items on the top shelf.  With no floor clerks, far away from the cashstand, I inched my hand upward while trying to remain on my feet.  Unfortunately the package smacked my face.  One edge of a crooked tooth bit into the inside of my upper lip.

As I jostled my purchases onto the conveyer belt, I tried to tell the clerk about my accident.  Six years of shopping in a store that ignores the needs of disabled persons fought my urge for calm.  The lady responded by blaming me.  “You should have gotten help,” she scolded.  My internal struggle roiled.  I tried to tell her that I should not have to come all the way back to the front of the store when a better system of shelving would put those small items within easy reach.  She rolled her eyes, shrugged, and started talking to the woman behind me.   I called to her attention that I had not finished talking.  She blamed me again, saying that she had been trying to sort out where my order ended and that I should have been more patient.  She might have been right, but I felt my mood darken.

I left the store feeling desolate.  Weary and wanting to be home, I stopped and stared in dismay at the long line of vehicles at a standstill on the road.  The Rio Vista bridge had been lifted for a passing boat.  I told myself it would not be long and started to pack the groceries in my vehicle. I only turned my back for a second, but that moment claimed my cart. I turned and watched it roll towards the exit.  Now I blamed myself.  Had I not mentioned the assaultive ice cream, the cashier might have offered help with my bags.  Perhaps I would even have gotten on the road before the traffic jam.

The buggy slowly rolled towards a  truck.  I watched with open mouth as it swerved at the last moment, avoiding the truck and catching in the depressed edge of the driveway.  I started forward, urging my trembling legs to keep walking, to hold, to endure.  

The driver’s side of the vehicle opened and a tall man loped around the front and snagged my cart.  He wheeled it around and brought it toward me.  Apologies gushed from my mouth.  I could have hit your nice truck, I practically sobbed.  He steadied the cart and reach to shake my head.  It’s just material goods, he assured me.  Just material goods.  No worries.  He kept my hand in his for a moment and looked into my eyes to let me feel his sincerity.  He told me that he was glad he met me.  He resumed the wheel of his vehicle just as the line on Highway 12 started to move.  I got into my own car, started the motor, and moved behind my inadvertent savior.  I took one look at his bumper and felt my heart open.  Of course, I murmured.  Why am I even surprised?

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

In Memory

Stephen Patrick Corley

12/25/59 – 06/14/97

Fare Thee Well – I love you more than words can tell.

My baby brother Stephen disappeared from this difficult world some time between June 07th and June 13th in 1997.  His gravestone notes his date of death as June 14th, but they could not say with any certainty.  They gave the span within a week.

We buried him in the Corley family plot in a cemetery in St. Louis, with the mother whom he loved beyond all measure, and the father whom he equally loathed.  His cremains bore a Grateful Dead sticker.  Someone tossed Cardinals football tickets into the small hole dug for the brass box.  His ex-wife stood stoically at my side, eyes blank, hands clenched.  She had mourned the loss of him years before that day, and doubtless has never stopped.

This morning I saw a little news report about Pat Sajack retiring from the television program Wheel of Fortune.  My heart skipped, and just for a few minutes, I sat by my mother’s bedside on some evening in 1985 when I had driven to St. Louis to take a stint in her sickroom.  Vanna White stood by the letters and Pat gestured for a contestant’s guess.  As the letters flipped, my mother chuckled and held the telephone receiver.  Inevitably it rang, she listened, nodded, and pronounced the caller to be correct.  When the next ring sounded, she lifted the receiver and chortled, Too late!  Thus did we play a cross-country game with our dying mother, with the first person to guess the Wheel of Fortune answer winning the priceless prize of her praise.

On one of those visits, my brother Stephen and I stood in the kitchen talking over coffee.  He shook his head and said, with his paramedic’s bluntness, It won’t be long now.  He did what he could.  Whatever else you might say about my brother’s behavior in the last few months of our mother’s life, he did love her.  He taught me how to melt her pain pills in the microwave, a skill that I stubbornly refused to understand how he learned.  He showed me the easiest way to stroke her throat to get her to instinctively swallow.  He sat in a chair by her side on many nights, doing what he could for her.  He took her pain into his heart.  We all did, really; but her baby seem to feel it quite keenly.  

A decade later, he still grieved.  He had a lot of monkeys on his back, did my little brother; and his inability to save his mama nestled boldly and cruelly among them.

I try to recall his face, and hers.  I start the annual grieving time right about now.  I imagine that last desperate drive he took, to his country land.  I won’t let myself picture the rest of it, except that quiet spot beside a tree where his friend later found him.   

I had a mural painted on my house several years ago in his honor.  The harsh sun had faded its bright colors, but I’m having it restored.  I think of my little brother sitting beneath a willow tree on the banks of a river, as the sun eases itself downward in the western sky.  He would be happy there; or if not happy, at least, perhaps, at peace.

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

June Night

I moved to California at Christmas-time in 2017.  I had planned to live in Sonoma County, but the RV park where I had a reservation burned in a devastating fire that October.  I scrambled for another spot, first talking with a person who had private property.  Ultimately, that place struck me as too isolated – a choice proved prescient.  That land lay in the mountains above Paradise, which burned just a year later in November of 2018. 

A tip from a stranger led me to Park Delta Bay.  Folks with RVs displaced by the Tubbs Fire fled to another park north of the Bay, the managers of which came from Missouri.  Seeing my useless reservation on the books of the destroyed park, they called to say they didn’t have room for me.  They suggested “this place in the Delta that wants tiny houses”.  Speaking over the phone from Kansas City, I expressed surprise.  “’The Delta’,” I repeated.  “Isn’t that in Mississippi?”

“Not that one,” they laughed.  They gave me the phone number and manager’s name of Park Delta Bay RV Park & Tiny House Resort, located on Andrus Island, adjacent to the San Joaquin River.  Two months later, I stood in front of Lot G8 waiting for my builder to arrive and back Angel’s Haven into her new home, where she – and I – have dwelt ever since.

Having dodged two of the worst fires in California history, I chose to believe that my future belonged to the California Delta.  When people asked me why I moved here, I would utter some variation of a standard evasion.  “Why not?” I would counter.  Or I would smile and simply say that it was a long story.  Few probed more deeply.  I spent my first year flying back and forth to try cases “back home”, a term that I still use to describe Kansas City.  A week in Missouri; a month in California; three weeks back home, two weeks at Park Delta Bay.  I had no chance to form attachments. 

Yet by the time I settled in earnest, as 2019 bloomed, I seemed to have established myself.  We started having community dinners.  The park management recruited me to do occasional blog posts and monitor the Facebook page.  Tiny House Row grew from three to fifteen.  Moreover, I got to know people in other types of dwellings, learning what differentiated a “trailer” from an “RV” and how to distinguish a Class A from a fifth wheel.  I came to understand that sustainable, small, self-contained living came in many shapes and interesting sizes.  Folks pursued this life for a multitude of reasons, from wanting to live more simply to craving mobility.  No two stories followed the same path to the Delta.  My new community defied stereotype.

When the pandemic hit, we long-term dwellers upon these fifteen acres existed in a bubble.  Though I work in an essential industry and continued going to the office each day, many of my neighbors stayed home.  We moved our weekly gatherings outside.  We started a market in the central meadow, staging the vendor tables six feet apart and distributing masks to visitors.  We tried to continue our lives, though some of our closest cohorts left the park between lockdowns.  

As the global health crisis waned, we noticed that we had grown closer as a community but also reconfigured.  New folks pulled their rigs into spaces from which beloved faces had decamped.  Vacationers came and went, occasionally participating in our events.  The garden we had started in 2018 died during the pandemic but got rejuvenated in 2022 and thrives today.  New people took over the organization of our dinners. 

All the while, the river flowed, the cars rolled by on the levee road above us, and the sun set over the old abandoned crane at the hairpin turn on Jackson Slough Road.

We’ve lost some friends whom we still salute, and for whom tears still flow from our half-closed eyes. I picture Candice’s father John driving away on his golf cart after stealth-weedeating my lot.  He lifts one hand,  without stopping, to acknowledge my thanks.   Other friends moved away; some lost touch, some still return to our joyful embrace.  My heart leaps as Spike comes down the driveway on his bike or Gerri and Carole alight from their car.   We remember them all.  They live in our hearts.  Our DNA evolved because of them.  We hear their voices; we recite their names; we can still picture their smiles, hear their jokes, treasure their advice, luxuriate in their compassion.

In 2017 as I prepared to leave the Midwest, I made a trip to see family and distribute trinkets that I’d accumulated from various relatives over the years.  I traveled to rural Missouri, then to the east side of the state, and eventually to my son’s place in Chicago.  One night, I stood with my brother Frank outside of his house near Tower Grove Park in south St. Louis.  We drank cold beverages and stared at the sky, knowing that soon, three days’ travel would prohibit the frequent visits that we could barely orchestrate with only four hours between us.  Finally, Frank said to me, “Just tell me you aren’t going to live in a trailer park.”  I laughed.  “Okay,” I quipped.  “I won’t tell you.”  He put his arm around my shoulder and we fell silent again.  “I hope it’s a good place,” he said, so quiet that I barely heard him.

It is a good place.  It’s got faults – what old facility doesn’t?  It’s plumbing requires constant attention.  The electricity had to be overhauled in my first year here.  The restoration of worn cabins that pre-date the current ownership screeched to a halt when material prices skyrocketed during Covid. Moreover, being in the Delta means that if the wind rises or too many migrating birds land on the wires, we could lose power for days.  In February we endure weeks of torrential rains but the rest of the year, we fret over drought that could kill the fruit crops.  

Yet with all of that, I cannot help but feel that those Missouri folks steered me right when they sent me to the Delta and to Park Delta Bay.  Each morning when I leave for work, Candice at the Kiosk waves and tells me that I should have a good day.  I watch as staff members who are cherished friends toil to get the pool ready for summer.  I toot my horn at Marje, who walks the Delta Loop each morning despite her 80+ years.  Dia from the east side of the park flashes a grin as she trots past with her dogs on training leads.  A sign tells me that there will be an art class in the community room this Saturday.  A camper pulls up to the office and I think, “Ah, we have visitors,” and then laugh to myself.

Visitors, I repeat, this time out loud in the car as I circle the Loop and pause to photograph a lone egret at the edge of the river.  Those are visitors, but I live here.  It might be – as a neighbor once observed – a land of broken toys.  If so, I have happily made my place among the old stuffed bears and the bedraggled shoeless dolls.  After all, who better than a Midwest ex-pat to understand that in the final analysis, there really is no place like home.

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

On January 05th of this year, I woke at 4:00 a.m. with a crazy idea of how I could appeal to customers in the little shop that I founded in historic Isleton, California.  I forced myself to sleep for another hour, and texted my cohort Michelle at 6am, babbling about this wall that we could build.  She calmly replied, “Get to the hardware store, here’s what we need, I’ll meet you at the store as soon as I’ve fed the goats.”

I stood at the door to Ace in Rio Vista waiting for it to open at 8:00 a.m.  A young clerk admitted that she had no idea what “cork board” might be.  We used her device to search the store’s inventory and found two bulletin boards in stock.  I bought both, some pushpins, the hardware Michelle had instructed me to buy, and a bag of cashews to replace the breakfast that I’d skipped.  Then I dashed back across the bridge and headed to Isleton.

Michelle and I rendezvoused at 8:45 a.m. at the first location of the shop.  Michelle has mad skills and can figure out how to fabricate anything.  By the time we opened at 10:00 a.m., we had a Gratitude Wall.  Our first customers wrote their notes, and we never looked back.

In April we found out that the shop had to move.  I texted Michelle and she drove over to my house.  We ate soup, bemoaned our fate, and then started plotting decampment.  It took a few weeks to find a location, but find one we did.  As soon as I signed the lease, I called Michelle again:  Can we move the Gratitude Wall?

We could.  Between Michelle and our cohort Ruthie, the Wall got moved and reinstalled in our new space.

At the end of each shift, I stand and study the new notes which sprout over the hours.  My heart sings.  We have notes from people in English, French, Italian, and Mandarin.  People express thanks for their family, their faith, their health, and the beauty of the California Delta.  Once in a while, two people express gratitude for each other — spouses, partners, siblings, friends.  They express thanks for surviving cancer, finding a job, and their very existence.  They even express thanks for the chance to leave a note on our Gratitude Wall.  

We have kept all of the notes beginning with that very first day.  Our collection of gratitude notes continues to grow.  From time to time, I leave another note of my own.  My thank-you’s nestle among those of the many visitors to Mubdie’s: A creative collective.  They are in good company.

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

As a child, I had four ambitions:  To get a poem published in the New Yorker; to be a kindergarten teacher; to live happily-ever-after; and to have six children.  I accomplished none of these goals, although I’m still working on that third one. 

My mother supported my dream of being a writer.  In her earlier days as an EKG technician at St. Louis County Hospital, she took one or the other child to work with her during the summer.  Of course, her goal focused on having fewer bodies in the line of my father’s hungover wrath, but I gleefully volunteered whenever I got the chance.

There, I would cut EKG lead strips (in the days before computers) to mount them on report pages, organize storage shelves, and, joy of joys, use her typewriter without interruption from a curious little brother.  That hospital office, with its curtained cubby for walk-in clinic patients, saw the first stacks of paper bearing the transcribed scribblings of a poet wannabe, before I realized that my feeble attempts at verse barely rose to the level of amateur.

Mother praised each short, structured missive.  When I had a project to submit some of them in English class, she organized and typed them herself, deeming herself superior in the hammering which produce clean copy.  The heavy strokes necessary to force key to page challenged my small hands.  She got a yellow three-pronged folder from the cabinet and showed me how to use the hole-puncher.  We created a book of my poetry.  I cherished that folder until it finally succumbed to the vagaries of time or too many moves.  

Over the years, I dabbled in poetry.  Eads Magazine in St. Louis published three of mine as a trio.  My mother insisted that I bring multiple copies of the edition to her.  She mailed them to unsuspecting relatives who feebly thanked her, I’m sure, and threw the issue into the basket on the floor by the couch.  I often wonder how shocked they would be to know that the imagery of the third verse referred to a miscarriage that I had in my mother’s bathroom.  “A child, once real, then gone” read one line.  My mother and I never spoke of it but she herself had nursed me through that episode just months before I submitted the lot for consideration.

I wrote several poems about my mother.  She never read them.  One I wrote during a period of uneasy alliance between us; another I composed after her death.  I do not know how she would have felt about the approach that I took to these odes to her resilience and my affection for her.  But every fiber of my being sings of her legacy.  All that I am; the choices that I’ve made; the way in which I make decisions; rises and falls on the strength I inherited from her.  Even my mistakes echo some that I realize she herself indulged.  My faults come from her but so does my endless capacity to forgive others, to nourish even the tiniest flicker of hope, and to open a window wide enough to allow healing breezes to fill the cramped space of my damaged heart.

Although I did not raise six children, the universe gifted me with one.  Some would say that I emulated my mother’s clumsy parenting in both its virtues and its flaws.  I do not speak for Patrick on the issue.  I struggled with parenting, though I unquestionably experienced the unbridled, unconditional love that a better poet might more deftly describe.   Perhaps that love drove me to fear loss so intensely that I fumbled the rest.  Perhaps my own damaged spirit never stood a chance to truly excel at raising any child.   Either way, I do not excuse any remission by blaming my own childhood.  I only pray, to paraphrase the words of Murry Burns, that my son speaks well of me when the opportunity to speak at all arises.

 I can honestly say that I see a lot of my mother’s gentle spirit in my son.  If a village helped me raise Patrick, my mother’s genes supported his psyche as he navigated the white waters of the home that I created.  For my part, I tried to channel the humor and perseverance of my mother’s style.  I realized early in my son’s toddlerhood that I could never have raised six children.  My admiration for my mother’s determination to bring the eight Corleys from infancy to adulthood bloomed as I struggled with just the one.

My mother’s greatest strengths revealed themselves in crises, large and small.  When a car struck me during my second year of law school, consigning me to a two-month stint in the hospital, Mom used all her vacation time to move herself and my father from St. Louis to Kansas City.  She camped in my apartment, made friends with the neighbors, and collected notes from my professors.  She dragged my father to my hospital room and greeted my visitors.  When one teacher asked if the accident had damaged my good leg or my bad leg, she loudly informed him that she hadn’t known I had a good leg and then uproariously laughed at her own joke.

Mother’s Day provides an opportunity to honor my mother.  But I try to let my admiration of her shine in everything I do.  I hope the best of her endures in me.  I certainly strive to bring it forward.  Time will tell if I have faithfully credited my mother’s example.  Until then, I shall just endeavor to put my best foot forward.

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

From A Daughter

What do I say to this woman
sitting across from me
over a society lunch?
What do I say to one
who changed my diapers,
and coaxed me through a pre-adolescent limp
and post-pubescent cramps?
How do I treat someone
who learned to drive at 40,
fought the maybe-giants and
organized picnics
When she wasn’t at work,
or scrubbing floors
or despairing?
There are no words for one
who is too familiar
with emergency rooms,
airports, and
Jails.
So I sit, choking on idle conversation
about the silver market
and over-sprouted beans,
neither of which I understand.
If I appear tense
it is because I also choke
on unexpressed devotion
and overwhelming sorrow.

© M. C. Corley, 1980, 2024