Hot Women Receiving Rain
June 11, 2026
This afternoon I was rushing to finish mowing my front lawn before the darkening clouds to the west rolled over me and the hill where I live on the west side of Cayuga Lake in central New York. I didn’t make it. I had to push the lawn mower into the shed as the raindrops started to fall.
As soon as I got in the house, I opened the back door and stood on the steps to watch the storm. The wind whiplashed the trees back and forth, the garden soaked up the moisture, and the plops of rain grew into rapid pellets as the thunder boomed and the lightning flashed. I was hot and sweaty from working outside on an afternoon when the temperature was in the high 80s, and the cool rain and wind felt so good. With every passing moment I relished the lifting of more heat from my body.
And I thought of all the women over millennia who have been in this very same position, who have experienced these same sensations. I imagined an Egyptian woman from the Old Kingdom coming in from her fields… a Black woman stretching her back and breathing in coolness after planting cotton on somebody else’s land… a Pueblo woman taking refuge under the overhang of a cliff dwelling… a herder in northern Europe sheltering under a rock. I was, in that moment, all of them, and they were me: every woman who has been working hard in the summer heat and then, upon receiving a reprieve from the suddenly not-so-indifferent skies, fully savored the moment.
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