Field Note #9
What the Drought Holds
September 20, 2026 | 5:46 PM
It has been weeks since I remember a real, soaking rain, and as I type this, I hear rumbling in the distance.
Could this be our rain coming?
My doors are open, and I am waiting for that first cool breeze. It is 90 degrees outside and 86 inside the house. I am ready for something to change.
The ground is hard. The streams are low. Plants that were thriving earlier in the summer are now barely holding themselves upright. Even the childhood lake where I once spent my summers has fallen to an all-time low.
Everything seems to be waiting. I am waiting, too.
A dear friend’s birthday arrived this month, and I wanted to give her an elderberry from my yard. Elderberry has always felt like a mothering plant to me, protective, generous, and present when the difficult seasons come. I wanted her to have one growing near her home as a symbol of strength for the season ahead, but I haven’t been able to dig it up.
We have had no rain, and the earth is too hard and dry to safely loosen its roots. The gift is still waiting in the ground, unable to be moved until the rain returns.
There is something familiar in that. Lately, I have felt caught in some of the same emotions, conversations, and questions, circling back without much movement. When nothing changes for long enough, hope begins to dry around the edges.
The heat has only added to it. This summer has felt trapped beneath the sun, and now, as we begin shifting toward fall, the air still refuses to turn.
I signed up for four seasons. I don’t think I could live somewhere with only one or two. I need the relief of autumn. I need the first cool morning, the changing leaves, and to breathe differently. I need the reminder that nothing (not heat, grief, uncertainty, or stagnation) is meant to remain forever.
We live without air-conditioning in our house. It is a choice we have made so we can feel the temperature rise and fall around us instead of living inside an artificial season. Some nights, that choice is uncomfortable, but it keeps me aware of the rhythms outside: the slightest breeze, the cooling darkness, and the small relief that sometimes arrives just before morning.
People deliberately seek contrasts in temperature through saunas and cold plunges. In some ways, we experience a gentler version of that contrast in our daily lives. The days are hot, but a cool shower lowers the heat held in our bodies. It brings the same instinctive relief as slipping into a cool river or spring after standing beneath the summer sun.
Living this way makes me notice the change as it happens, the moment the air cools, the breeze shifts, or my body begins to soften, but this year, even those rhythms feel strained. When something in the body cannot move, it can become inflamed. I wonder whether this landscape is experiencing its own kind of inflammation: too much heat held for too long, too little water moving through, everything swollen with the need for release.
Why isn’t Mother Nature pushing the change? Or perhaps the drought itself is the change.
Perhaps it is revealing what cannot continue as it has been. Perhaps the low streams and exhausted plants are not evidence that nature has stopped speaking, but evidence that we have not yet learned how to listen.
And still, in the driest part of my yard, the purslane remains.
Its small, succulent leaves hold water while nearly everything around it is wilting. Often dismissed as a weed, purslane spreads close to the earth, quietly preserving what it needs. It does not fight the conditions. It adapts to them.
Purslane is one of our most nourishing wild plants in summertime. It offers plant-based omega-3s, along with vitamins C and E, beta-carotene, minerals, and antioxidants that nourish the body and support the skin against oxidative stress.
Beneath a sun that has felt relentless, this small plant is holding both water and medicine. It is here to remind us of the nourishment we may need during a season of heat and drought.
Today, though, its medicine feels larger than its nutrients. Purslane reminds me to look for what sustains us when abundance is no longer obvious.
What have I stored for the dry seasons?
Where can I conserve my energy instead of forcing growth?
What continues to live in me, even when I am beginning to lose hope?
The purslane does not tell me when the rain will come. It does not pretend the heat is comfortable or that waiting is easy. It simply holds what it has been given and stays close to the ground.
Outside, the thunder is still rumbling. I don’t know yet whether the rain will reach us or pass by in the distance, but sooner or later, the season will turn. The rain will return. The streams will rise, and the hardened ground will soften enough to receive it. When it does, I will dig carefully around the elderberry’s roots and pass this living gift from one patch of earth to another.
Until then, perhaps our work is not to force the change.
Perhaps it is to notice what is still alive, protect what sustains us, and make sure that when the rain finally comes, we have not become too hardened to let it in.
Today’s Notes
Outside: 90° Hot, dry, and unrelenting
Location: Home in South Knoxville
Noticed: The plants are barely holding themselves uprigth.
Ally Plant: Purslane
Question I’m Taking Home: What is the drought asking us to change?
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