Salt Cartography

The estuary remembers the shape of water that has already left it — channels pressed into mud like a signature, still legible.

My grandmother folded bread dough the way tides fold, patient and enormous, her wrists tracing a map no one taught her.

I have been trying to find the coast where her hands learned that motion, somewhere between the old country and flour.

The salt flats give nothing back easily. What you walk across, you carry — crystals that catch in the seams of your boots and dissolve, later, in rain you don't remember.

Distance is not the problem. The problem is knowing that the estuary keeps making its channels whether or not the sea returns.