COLUMBUS, Ohio — Forty umbrellas gathered in the basement of Grace Lutheran Church on Tuesday evening for the first meeting of Handles Together, a peer support group for objects who are indispensable for about eleven minutes at a time.

“I just want to say that I kept someone dry for an entire walk from the parking garage,” said a black, slightly bent umbrella who asked to be identified only as Gary. “Then they went inside, the clouds broke, and I haven’t seen daylight since. That was 2019. I am in a Cheesecake Factory. I think it’s still the same table.”

The room nodded, or at least swayed, as several umbrellas do when someone says something true.

Attendees described a common pattern: a frantic, grateful embrace at the first drop of rain, followed by a gradual loosening of the grip, followed by a sudden and total absence. Many reported being left in trunks, where they say they lie among jumper cables and a single child’s shoe, listening to the engine and waiting for weather.

“What these umbrellas are describing is a textbook case of precipitation-contingent attachment,” said Dr. Marguerite Offenbacher-Plume, a senior fellow in Post-Storm Object Relations at the Midwestern Institute for Dampness Studies. “The human relationship with the umbrella is entirely transactional. It is a love that exists only while it is inconvenient to be wet.”

Offenbacher-Plume added that the umbrellas’ distress is compounded by the fact that humans routinely buy a replacement for $9 from a bucket near a pharmacy register rather than retrieve the original from the place they left it.

“That’s the part that gets me,” said a compact collapsible umbrella with a faded Cincinnati Reds logo, speaking quietly during the sharing circle. “They didn’t even come back for me. They just bought another me. It was a worse me. It had a plastic tip.”

Facilitator Denise Kowalczyk, a retired school bus driver who volunteered to host after finding a large golf umbrella in the church’s lost-and-found bin, said she was moved by the turnout. “I didn’t know what to expect,” she said. “But when I opened the doors, they were just standing there in the vestibule, dripping a little, waiting to be asked in. Honestly, it was the most any of them had been asked for in years.”

“Nobody ever says ‘thank you’ to an umbrella. They say ‘where is it,’ and then they say ‘forget it.’”

The meeting followed a loose agenda of introductions, a moment of silence for umbrellas that were inverted by wind on a Chicago street and never recovered, and a short presentation on boundary-setting, which several attendees noted they are structurally unable to do. Refreshments included coffee, which no one drank, and a plate of lemon bars, which an elderly church volunteer insisted on placing under each umbrella’s canopy anyway.

By the end of the evening, members had exchanged contact information, though most conceded they would probably be left in the building overnight and would have to be retrieved by Kowalczyk.

Forecasts call for rain Thursday. Members say they are cautiously optimistic, and fully prepared to be disappointed.