Burnt

Wildfires have become the new reality we live in. In the Summer of 2021, wildfires destroyed ancestral land that my mother inherited from her parents. Her late parents planted many of the trees that were burned. These trees stood as the last living memories of them. And here is my mother lost in thought, grieving saliently, surrounded by loss, getting absorbed in the world she knew and now is gone.

Two years after the fire, the land is slowly healing itself. What remains as evidence of the destruction are the dead pine trees. They stand there, proud, enduring, reminding of what it was and what was lost forever.