This essay by professor Sonya Huber takes the traditional non-fiction essay and adds a creative spin to it. She takes two topics of her own concern--her own chronic joint pain and global warming--and combines them into the essay to show how even though the effects of each can be crippling, we must be strong and find other ways to fix them.
She first uses strong imagery as a metaphor to compare the brewing storm in the sky (which caused her joint sickness to badly flare up) to the brewing pain in her bones. She says, "If [I] could map [my] pain, the constellation of joints would glow on the map, lit to follow storm fronts and hurricanes." It was interesting to hear her talk about her pain not only because lupus/rheumatoid/psoriatic arthritis is something I have not experienced, but also because of the fact that the weather going south made it worse. At first it might not seem that out of the ordinary; I know many people who get 'rain headaches', but when you think about it, being forced to succumb to your couch because of extreme pain every time there is a rainstorm must make one tough person out of you. Her use of the extended metaphor throughout her essay makes sense because it must be so unfathomable (I certainly know I had trouble wrapping my head around it) for others to understand her struggle. I think this was an amazing way to get her point across, and provided such an effective way of showing her readers what it is like to be in her shoes.
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