Where I’m Writing From: A Thunderstorm eli.cranor@gmail.com March 12, 2023 Eli Cranor is an Arkansas novelist whose debut novel, Don’t Know Tough, is available wherever books are sold. Don’t Know Tough made @USATODAYBooks’s “Best of 2022” list and the @nytimes “Best Crime Fiction” for 2022 Cranor can be reached using the “Contact” page at elicranor.com and found on Twitter @elicranor

Cranor Lake

I’m writing from a thunderstorm.

The kind that only comes in March, maybe early April too.

I’m hunkered down in my office as the wind picks up outside and great sideways gusts blow in off the lake. The windows rattle. It’s early morning. A little after five. I’m trying to write, but the wind is really howling now.

Storms didn't use to scare me. I grew up hearing tornado sirens every Wednesday at noon. My high school mascot was the “Cyclone.” I never really thought much about storms at all, not until we moved to the lake.

Storms are different out here. Not quite hurricane status, but real waves crash and spew beneath our deck. My neighbor told me small rocks get blown up from the bank and pankle (my neighbor didn’t use this verb; Charles Portis did) against his back window. My neighbor’s house is at least a hundred feet from the water’s edge.

Used to, I’d curl up with a book when a storm came rolling in. “Good sleeping weather.” That’s what my daddy called it. And I got it. I knew what he meant. There’s something primal about the protection a house provides. There's nothing more comforting than shelter from the storm.

Except, it’s really raining out there now.

A small rock might have even hit my window, and we just had those windows installed last year, and if I’m being really honest, that’s why storms scare me now when they never did before.

For as long as I can remember, I yearned for a place to call home. I wanted traditions and culture that oozed forth from the very essence of my being. I was born in the Delta and raised in the River Valley. Jumping back and forth between those two Arkansas regions highlighted their differences, but also made me feel like I never truly belonged to either one.

I felt the same way about Arkansas for a long time. Felt like my home state was lacking the vibrant ethos of say New Orleans. When I met someone from the Big Easy, I knew they were from the Big Easy. Bourbon Street was in their blood. I got the same feeling from people who lived on the beach or made their home in the mountains. Real mountains like the Rockies.

Those people were proud of their geography, proud of their city, and repped it accordingly.

I longed for that kind of pride, but I’d grown up in a middle-class neighborhood called Deer Run. We had a drainage ditch we called “The Creek.” We dammed it up with bricks in the summer and broke out ice chunks when it froze over each winter. But “The Creek” was still just a drainage ditch, one of a dozen that cut their way through Deer Run.

For a while I tried leaning on my heritage. My cousins found a family crest in my grandma’s attic. Apparently, the Cranors hailed from Scotland, or Ireland. Maybe both. I don’t know. But I did get that crest tattooed on my left shoulder the day I turned 18, still itching for a place to call home.

That itch finally got scratched when we moved out to the lake. We poured our hearts into gutting and remodeling this house. We stripped it down to the studs, saw the bones of the place, how fragile it really was, then went about building it back up again.

And that’s why the storm still raging outside my office scares me.

You see, I’ve finally found a place to call home, a place my kids can look back on and say, “That’s where I’m from. I was raised on the water.” But with love comes worry, fear that all the work we’ve done will get washed away.