Erika Gisela Abad

Finding Home in Hurricane Hillary

Humidity fills the air as the outskirts of Hurricane Hillary dance in the desert sky, and the rain taps against the carport’s roof, bringing me back to my childhood Summers in Puerto Rico.  The rhythm transports me to standing next to my grandmother on the porcelain patio floor, watching the rain spill from the Puerto Rican Sky. On desert nights like this, with rain crowding between the sky, earth, and air, I feel closer to my grandmother. Unlike generations of writers before me who write about going home or returning to the land of their parents for belonging,  I would rather return to my grandmother.  The ways Puerto Rico, the Caribbean’s oceans, seas, and storms get resurrected as Hurricane Hilary rushes over Black Mountain’s ridge expose the valley of ache borne from her death. This is what I think and feel from my patio as I watch Hillary’s rains and wind that remind me that the desert water once resided here.

Three and a half years after standing on the earth quaking on my mother and grandmother’s island, Puerto Rico, I am tucked in on the interior side of my patio doors because a West Coast hurricane sweeps through the desert and can, at any minute, bring about a flood. Desert hurricanes are as unlikely here as earthquakes used to be in Puerto Rico, until 2019 and 2020 shook them into Puerto Rico’s winter.  Despite my concerns of what earth Hurricane Hilary would shake, I did not watch the news that night. I do not look for what the hurricane is doing to the desert because Hilary inspires something else in me.

Like in Puerto Rico, and other rainy regions, the wind’s waltz with trees warned of the rain ahead. The Desert Willow outside my apartment sways in the rainy breeze, its green leaves dimly illuminated in the darkness. Before Hurricane Hilary wept over the Black Mountain, the temperature dropped, the sky clouded, and I disconnected from screens and sounds that could distract me from what was to come. Days before, I had read about Hillary’s anomalous trip up the west coast; I had seen the houses flooded, and the streets overwhelmed not unlike what I had seen in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and in New Orleans after Katrina. Those places were accustomed to the way women would storm through their valleys, even when urbanization and poverty left humans scrambling for survival. 

Those of us in the desert have crowded out the little water that was here, running away from overpriced apartments in the places of birth we can no longer call home. Maps will tell you that the Vegas Valley has been drying out the more the population grows. News of Hurricane Hillary further warns of the toll of climate change. And still, as the rain thickens, I sit in my desert refuge, swinging in my six-month-old hammock. The creaking of the back-and-forth returns me to Puerto Rico, imagining a life of consistently returning to find a home with her, immortalized in her white roses, pink hibiscus in the garden next to her patio’s hammock. 

As the rain quiets around us, I want to travel back to when I was small enough to rest my head against my grandmother’s heartbeat. Small and young enough to fit, tucked into her as the hammock would swing us to rest in the hazy humidity of childhood summers where work was the last thing on my mind. 

Then, when it rained, I’d get up and stand next to my grandmother, partially sheltered from the rain. I would look at my grandmother’s pale, wide feet, studying the bunions and wrinkles that told the story of a woman who walked too many miles before she could slow down, rest, and sit with the smells of her garden, her neighborhood, her home. Her toes stuck over the bend of the patio, tempted like mine used to be, to stay still on the ocean shore, lost in wonder with how big the world between us was, with how the deep love around us could carry so many secrets. 

As the rain persisted, my gaze would move past the tip of her toes, swing to where those tips cast shadows over the bend that water could not climb. The bend prevented the patio from flooding like the road in front of us. With my aunt’s army blanket around me, I relished the way my grandmother and I were tucked in la guinea, the flattened valley on the mountain called Tanama. To my left, the road slowly stretched up and around into the sky, houses inching their way up as tall as the trees would let them grow. To my right, my grandmother stood, reliving childhood memories she was always too guarded to share. 

 Her rare soft smile, a contagion of calm in those moments no one needed her. She would scan the way little ones made a playground of summer storms, eyes dancing with memories of similar whimsy. The kids from the neighborhood, la guinea, would kick and splash in the quenepa-colored stream going down the road. I want to wait as we set our heartbeats to the rain’s pitter-patter against the zinc awning, the cement road, the avocado, and grapefruit trees above us.

I open my eyes into the present, parking lamps numbly illuminating the leaves on the trees in the corner outside my patio. Their leaves are not as thick or as wide as the leaves of my childhood summers. I stand at my patio door, inhaling the rain’s mist which encourages the scent of creosote to reclaim the air over heat, construction and the smell of car exhaust. Looking at the night sky turned purple from the distant Casino strip lights that reach too far to let me see the stars so far from hope. Closing my eyes again, I focus on setting set my heartbeat to the debts between the water and the leaves outside of my apartment, hungering for hope. As my heart and the rain’s rhythm get achingly close, I feel my grandmother here in this quiet, in this rest.

The other day, a friend of mine asked if she was my home because so many others were struggling to be home with her and home for her. Still, here, in the solitary silence of a hurricane-swept night, I am home in my skin. Despite all the unsaid and misunderstood, I am home in the memory of my grandmother’s love for water. Water as soft as rural rain, as vast as the Atlantic Ocean she’d fly over to visit, and as slippery in our search for a place to land, a place to be still. 

I do not know how to explain being homesick for the rain. Whether Puerto Rico or the Pocumtuck Valley in Massachusetts, the green where I first learned to love greens beyond my grandmother’s sanctuary for me. New England rain landed on my skin, giving me a taste a freedom to dream and read the women before me rarely knew. Catching in my hair, sliding out of my hands, and echoing against other elemental roofs, adolescent rain cooled, fed, and warmed all at once. Here, in the desert, rain feeds the hungry too quickly to catch or slide or echo. Still, Hurricane Hillary’s rain will last more than minutes or hours it will take to forget she happened; it lasted long enough to allow Black Mountain to bloom green, the creosote dancing in revelation. 

Green in such abundance, like every other color the desert permits, feels like the lottery. Between my childhood in Chicago’s urban landscape and my adolescence in the Pocumtuck valley, leaves went from bright and emerald greens to yellows and burnt oranges and browns and reds that flickered like fireflies dancing among branches. Pocumtuck Valley leaves went from bright and emerald greens to yellows and burnt oranges and Browns and Reds that flickered like fireflies dancing among branches. If I did not find hope in those leaves, in the smell and the stick of them, I do not know that I would have found other forms of healing. As the rain quiets, my face feels as wet as a parking lot road looks, awash with joys, and sorrows, and hopes of more rain to come. 

Since 2021, I have asked myself how a Caribbean kid finds home in the desert. The night Hurricane Hillary rushed her skirt over Black Mountain’s ridge, with grackles crooning a sound that’s a cousin to the coqui, provided an answer. When, in the days after Hilary leaves, the desert’s returned to forgetting she used to hold a sea, I feel my grandmother’s thick, soft hands enclosed over mine in silent prayer for the healing that is to come. I close my eyes tight to return to the stars that glittered over so many other skies. I now know, beyond the lights and past the clouds, they are watching over me. In such dreams, I still feel the heat of humidity in the air that sways and stills to the ever-shifting mood of this summer night, and I know I am home. I know I am home.