This collage is made from five pieces of paper: the foreground asphalt, the sky, the building, the man, and the woman on the bench watching it all happen.

She drank a cup of coffee on a busy street in downtown Abingdon, a town somewhere in Virginia. We had stopped there overnight en route to Memphis, Tennessee to visit C’s uncle who lives there. We’d last seen him about 15 years or 20 ago, also on a drive through, this time from Memphis. He was there with his wife in their house at the top of a hill perched above a river. They had hummingbird feeders on the deck at the rear of the house and the birds swooped down from the tall trees between the house and the river. The tiny birds were bold, unafraid of us people standing just feet away from the feeders as they buzzed and flitted near our heads.

We have hummingbirds near our home too, though not in such numbers as we live in a busy city neighborhood. We’ve put out feeders for them, but we mustn’t be doing it right as they ignore them, and instead go for the zinnias and hibiscus.

The man with the stick is Zalan, and he makes enormous sand etchings in Southern California, which soon get swept away with the tide, which he doesn’t mind. To him, that’s the point. “It’s temporary, like everything else,” he says (or something like that). How can you get attached to something that’s gone within the day? You can find him on Instagram @Zalansz. Here he is in the midst of it all:

Everything we humans do is temporary. We marvel at our ancient pyramids and other structures, but they too will be gone in the geologic blink of an eye. The parking lot I placed my wife in, was once new, and before that was a field or part of a forest and one day, left alone, will turn to rubble, then overgrowth, then who knows what. The roofless building in the background is the Chapel of Ease, Beaufort, SC, built around 1740, and burnt in a forest fire in 1866. It stands today, but one day, will likely be underwater, built as it is in the South Carolina low country, just a few feet above sea level.

I spend hours and hours making even the simplest collages, from selecting images, printing them, cutting them, arranging them, and finally gluing them together. One day, decades from now, the colors will fade, the glue will dry and fail, and the collage itself will disappear. The tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken will turn to digital dust, and eventually, when I’m gone, the memory of who I am will no longer be, washed over by the tides and rising water.