The Hope Chest: Weekly (ish), I’m reaching in the hope chest and pulling out one of my old essays to set it here exactly as it was — typos, tangents, weird obsessions, non-existent capital letters and all. Then I’ll sit down next to my past self, like an old friend over gelato, and tell her what I think now. Not to correct her. Just to say: Look what you already knew; look how far you’d already come.
August 2026
It’s August. It’s hot — but the sun has started sliding across the sky a little slant. At night I can feel autumn whispering underneath the crickets, and even if she doesn’t come until October, I feel her pulling at the soles of my feet. In two days, my daughter will start her senior year of high school and I’ll send my son off to another year of college.
It’s August, and I’m dangling my feet over the edge of my time as a mother of kids at home. It’s strange and unsettling and has me thinking about rain.
We’re in the middle of a relentless, driving drought here in Utah. The driest January to July since such records have been kept. It’s one thing for the sun to burn hot. It’s another thing to feel the same burning from the ground. Utah is hot and it is dry and it’s like you can hear the scrub oak weeping in the early sunrise.
A day or two ago, it rained and we all ran out into the storm, holding our palms out. Water falling from the sky! It felt like a fairy tale. And set me thinking about the rain we used to see in Cleveland Ohio.
Back in August 2007, my son was nine months old. We were living in Little Italy in Cleveland, Ohio, near the Case Western University campus for my husband to attend dental school. Our apartment was the main floor of a fading craftsman with the biggest porch you’ve ever seen: a pretty marvelous spot to watch the rain. Back then, I had never seen midwest rain.
eclipse
august 7, 2007 | cleveland, ohio
there is rain outside heavy enough to purge sin.
it’s flushing along the road. flushing along the students holding umbrellas, soaked anyway. flushing along the dirt in the cracks of the sidewalk, the dead heads on my petunia, the odds and ends left on the tree lawn (free!).
a frightening total eclipse of the day.
weather
august 27, 2007 | cleveland, ohio
three days of ohio rain. thick clouds grazing the tops of buildings. drowning in the dark: i dug my lightbox out from behind the couch this morning.
when i was little, in colorado, rain was mythic. rain didn’t just come, it never stooped out of the sky of its own accord. we had to coax it from heaven, with prayers, with dances, with long dead stalks of weeds and rituals we imagined and performed from the ridges of red rock. and when it would come, finally!, we ran outside.
we laid on the warm cement driveway and let rain crackle over us. we turned over our bigwheels and collected the rain in its crevices. we opened our palms and let them soak with rain. we shouted, we laughed, we jumped double-dutch, we watched it stream in flash-flood rivers down the gutters of the street. rain! rain! rain! and that night we would thank god for moisture, because that was all that was left. a filmy hint of wet along the grass, pretending not to notice the return of the sun.
in ohio, the rain is a faucet a bucket a shower a deluge. after one day of rain, two days, three, four, five, i want to punch through the clouds. i want to collect the wetness in my arms and throw it back: somewhere ... to the bosom of lake erie or the clouds that spilled it. i want it to stop. drowning me.
We can’t wish for midwest rain here on the edge of the desert because it would wash us all away — the dirt too dry and surprised— we’d float all the way to the sea, holding onto our roofs like rafts.
“The sun has started sliding across the sky” I like that opening. Sweet juxtapositions of geographies, lands, Midwest versus Colorado rain. Enjoyed this.
PS my dad specialized at Case Western…