This essay was listed as “notable” in The Best American Travel Writing 2021
“It is raining but there is no rain. The clouds move across the hills like jellyfish, tentacles of water evaporating into the scorched green air. I hold out a hand, as if beseeching the sky for a droplet. I feel nothing.
I am twelve years old. My three younger siblings stand beside me, as do my parents. It is our first full day in Montana, at the ramshackle cabin where we will be living for the next three months. That word— cabin—may evoke visions of rustic sweetness, but our rental is not rustic. It is not sweet. It is yellowed logs and foam insulation. It is jammed doors and plywood siding. It is the faint scent of mouse poison and a wide wooden porch that looks out on a creek: a curve of greenery in a remote landscape otherwise given entirely over to grey.”
Read the piece HERE.