Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

In the summers of my childhood, afternoon thunderstorms seemed to come up out of nowhere. One minute, I’d be stretched across the hammock beneath the oak trees in my grandmother’s backyard, listening to the slow creak of the ropes in the still air, and the next, the wind would move through the branches, turning the leaves silver-side up toward a darkening sky. By the first low roll of thunder, I was already running for the house.

At school, we practiced tornado drills in the hallways, away from windows and open space, folded tight against cinderblock walls with our heads tucked to our elbows, believing the center of the building could protect us from whatever might come loose from the clouds.

My grandmother, though, welcomed a summer storm.

She’d sit on the front porch as long as she could, rocking slowly and listening for the rain to move across town. She loved the sudden coolness in the air and the earthy smell that rose from the ground ahead of the rain.

But she knew storms frightened me. So when thunder rattled the windows and rain hammered the roof, she’d go to her bedroom closet and bring down the quilts, the ones her mother had pieced together years before. We’d drape them across the organ bench, over the sofa arms and side chairs, weighing down the corners with stacks of Reader’s Digest condensed books, until, right there in the middle of the house, a small sanctuary took shape.

I’d crawl inside with a book and, if the storm seemed especially bad, a flashlight. Beneath the patchwork calico, the thunder faded, softened by old cloth and cotton batting.

Sometimes my grandmother joined me, easing herself carefully onto the floor, her knees stiff with the arthritis she rarely mentioned. She told stories about growing up in a farmhouse with eight brothers and sisters — snapping beans on the porch in the evenings, sleeping with the windows open in the summer — and after a while, I stopped listening to the storm altogether.

I’ve come to think children do not build blanket forts simply for play. Surely something deeper is at work there, an early instinct for retreat, for a protected place against noise and uncertainty. Maybe that longing never leaves us.

In Robbinsville, I once spent the night in a treehouse cabin in the Great Smokies, string lights glowing like fireflies. At Broad River Campground near Shelby, I stepped inside geodesic domes whose curved canvas walls seemed to muffle the sounds beyond them. At Sugarneck in Sanford, the glamping tents come with electricity, hot water, and every modern convenience, yet what stayed with me most was not the comfort but the sensation of being briefly removed from the clatter of everyday life.

Sometimes I wonder what my grandmother would make of all these grown-up hideaways scattered across North Carolina. I suspect she would understand them immediately.

Maybe what we’re really seeking is not adventure, but the feeling of being sheltered, of sitting safely inside while someone calm and unafraid is nearby, holding everything steady until the storm passes.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief