Raking Light

by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

I. Prairie State
When the basement floods, I know exactly what to rescue first. The matching end tables are both too boxy for me to heave upstairs on my own, but I am on my own, so I take the first one in my arms and muscle it up one step at a time, because I remember these tables in my grandmother’s condo, remember the fragile glass lamps that sat atop each one. I don’t remember what my grandmother kept in the drawers of these tables when they were hers—perhaps her church directory, her TV remote controls, a phone book, miscellaneous plastic toys for her grandchildren to puzzle over. Now that they are mine, the table drawers are stuffed with throw pillows I’ve no other place for, and I don’t know where I’m going to put these tables now, except they must go somewhere for safekeeping. I tuck one into the corner of my son’s playroom, where it sticks out like an apartment building looming over a city block, and that’s exactly what it becomes, my son flying his Matchbox helicopters over it like any other landmark in his imaginary play.

II. North Star
I run, five or six years old, across my grandmother’s front yard, chasing—what? My sisters are there, probably, and my parents, but Gramma is inside. I run and the blades of grass beneath my bare feet are beautiful, the raking light of late afternoon both bright and blinding. My lungs are filled with laughter and clean air, no hint of anxiety about the breathing disease that will claim my grandmother’s life in just a few years. I run around the big green electricity box that marks a border in our safe-play area in this yard. My sisters, maybe, are behind me. I run, pretending I can outrun them, though my lungs ache, already, to take a break.

III. Diamond State
There’s just enough snow on the hill behind my mother-in-law’s house to make a sled run thrilling enough for a three-year-old, so we fetch the sled she’s purchased in case of snow days just like this one. My son perches in the sled at the top of her hill, and she waits at the bottom to catch him, to stop him before he careens into the bushes and creek behind her. He slides, maybe soars, and maybe there is bright glee blazoned on his face, but I can only hear him laughing as the sled carries him beyond my reach. My mother-in-law catches him, yes, but it’s up to me to slip down the hill and collect him, the sled, his wayward hat and gloves, and trek back up with kid and kit in tow.

IV. Lone Star
These days I try to help my mother-in-law however I can, which is mostly mowing the steep hill in her yard so she doesn’t have to, and fiddling with her electronics whenever things go haywire. I don’t know how anything works but I do know how to google, which is how I know anything about the places where my father’s family came from: villages of Finland Swedes tucked into watery backlands. These days I try to plot some kind of trajectory across time and space, constellating my own experience with some of the women who have shaped me. I am older now than my mother was when she cared for her own declining mother-in-law. These days I explain to my son about cities and states and the places we come from. It’s no wonder that my grandmother’s parents settled in northern Minnesota, where twelve thousand lakes must have echoed the landscapes they remembered. These days I turn my head toward the sunset whenever my mother-in-law points it out in awe, a reminder, perhaps, of the wide horizons of her Texas childhood.

V. State of Wonder
The first time we go camping together, the thunder starts rolling the moment my son and I are alone at the campsite. The bones of the tent are up, meshy windows no match for the rain that’s on its way. My son is small but capable, I think, and I think maybe we can finish the tent together before the storm. I hand him one end of the rain fly and we drag it over the tent, raise it high above our heads. Once, I huddled in the basement with my grandmother, waiting for the tornado we’d been warned about, and I’d been certain we were safe. Now, we have nothing but waterproofed nylon, the bald cypress trees above them, to protect us from lightning. I take a deep breath, the thing we tell my son to do to ward off tears, and I think, if we run, we can make it to the cinder block bathhouse before the rains really come.

Hillary Moses Mohaupt is a listmaker: she’s a writer, operations professional, baker, flâneuse, and francophile. Her work has been published in For Page and Screen, Dogwood, sneaker wave, Brevity’s blog, The Writer’s Chronicle, Hippocampus Magazine, Distillations Magazine, Split Lip, Lady Science, the Journal of the History of Biology, and elsewhere. Born in the Midwest, she now lives in the Mid-Atlantic.