Rain Like Cotton in BOMB

Driving on four lane highways with intermittant stoplights past strip malls and the airport... Climate collapse 13,000 years ago, ice, floods, an inland sand sea... The Shakers with their radical ideals of shared property, transcendence and celibacy, feminism. The landfill, the airport, dreams of utopia, suburbs of utopia, dreams of flight, Nabokov’s endangered butterfly, modernism. All happen here on the same stretch of land, a primordial landscape that is harbinger of what is to come and a relict of the past. As research for my book GROWING UP MODERN, I wrote a hybrid braided essay for BOMB, “Rain Like Cotton.”