My Year Without Complaining

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By: Corinne Corley

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One of the drawbacks of living in 198 square feet, not counting the lofts, involves needing to regulate the flow of air.  I did not have input into the heating in my tiny house because I had no idea how pivotal it could be.  I got lost in the details and blinded by the romanticized…

The calendar hints at the nearness of my seven-year anniversary as a Delta resident.  I feel the passage of time.  Milestones slip by.  A former spouse dies; my son visits; my oldest brother and his long-time partner marry.  Muscles and bones ache a bit more each morning.
The heater in my tiny house kicks into…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…