Cartography of Salt

The tide does not remember the shore it has shaped for ten thousand years. Only the stone holds the curve of the leaving.

My grandmother's hands knew bread the way water knows a riverbed— by pressure, by yielding, by the slow translation of self into something given.

I find her in the smell of yeast before dawn, in the resistance of dough that won't be rushed, in the way flour settles into the creases of the board like snow deciding, finally, where it belongs.

What we call forgetting is only the tide pulling back to become itself again— the water is still the water, the salt still tastes of somewhere deeper.