When people think of Ohio’s climate, I’m sure what comes to mind immediately are images of lake-effect snow, the kind that blankets Cleveland and the eastern shore of Lake Erie in the winter. But as a Toledoan who grew up on the western side of the lake, what comes to mind first is the humidity (or my mother, in the summer months, saying that “el dewpoint” has reached 70 and we will need to pull out the foam mattresses and sleep downstairs in the air-conditioned TV room).

It’s hard to imagine that a place that gets such winters, such snows, such grey skies could even have a summer. But in Toledo, it sometimes felt like we got more than summer — we got a redemption bordering on an overcorrection. Not only does it get hot there, it gets stuffy. The city is surrounded by bodies of water: the lake, rivers, and, if you’ll allow me, the farmland and fields of corn, which I learned later in life let off moisture known as “corn sweat.”

Oddly enough, ever since moving to Washington, DC, from the Midwest (it will be eight years this fall), one of the things that has made me feel most at home is the very same thing that tends to cause a short-term population loss in the District every summer: the humidity. It’s strange — because even I find it unbearable sometimes — but when June arrives, I find myself looking forward to months and months of long, humid walks about town.

When working on my debut collection of short stories, Carryout, I drafted the stories across a number of places, and in all them, I found myself walking quite a lot, taking a particular mood with me on a stroll and opening myself up to any other moods that might’ve been lurking about the city streets.

Sometimes, you don’t want to investigate too closely what is working for you — writers, after all, can be superstitious — but I’ll just say that something about DC helped me to accomplish much of the writing, rewriting, and editing that it took to complete the collection. And I wouldn’t doubt if that “something” had to do with the city’s climate. Being away from Toledo while writing about Toledo and my memory of the place, I found myself always turning to the seasons, to the weather, to the moods found in nature there. A city’s emotional weight can often be tied to such things.

And though there are differences between the cities, of course — namely, the winters are milder here in DC, and the landscape is not as flat — there’s a certain swampiness that both share. Toledo is built atop the (once) Great Black Swamp, and the nation’s capital, while not an actual swamp, feels like one nonetheless.

And that’s the important thing: that feeling. Because there’s nothing like stepping out into a summer afternoon — in DC, in Toledo — and feeling like the place has absorbed you. It feels like somewhere. It feels like a memory, at once heavy and weightless.

[Editor’s note: This piece is in support of the Inner Loop’s “Author’s Corner,” a campaign that spotlights a DC-area writer and their recently published work from a small to medium-sized publisher. The Inner Loop connects talented local authors to lit lovers in the community through live readings, author interviews, featured book sales at Potter’s House, and through Eat.Drink.Read., a collaboration with restaurant partners Pie Shop, Shaw’s Tavern, and Reveler’s Hour to promote the author through special events and menu and takeout inserts.]

Hasan Dudar is the author of the short-story collection Carryout (University of Iowa Press). He is originally from Toledo, Ohio, and currently lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC, where he works in broadcast media. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast and Pinch, among other places, and was awarded the 2025 Pinch Literary Award in Fiction. A graduate of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Hasan’s reporting has appeared in various publications, including USA Today, Detroit Free Press, the Toledo Blade, Bloomberg News, TRT World, and Aljazeera America. In 2015, he co-produced the award-winning documentary “The Last of Little Syria,” which follows some of the last Arab American residents living in Toledo’s historic Arab enclave.