Caroline Burke

Colorado

I was five when the water left us, so I relied on my mother’s memories to make sense of what we lost. She didn’t have many memories herself — for although the water left when she was an adult, it had been in a state of departure for decades leading up to the fact: tides lengthening out across days, ponds drying out into dust craters — and so she told me the same story again and again in an effort to help me understand.