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The summer that Covid-19 arrived in the U.S. my wife was diagnosed with cancer.
A couple of weeks later, the dams on either side of my parents' house in Michigan collapsed, causing the lake they live on to go downstream and destroy most of their town. Because I was my wife's caretaker and because I couldn't risk exposing my parents to Covid I didn't get to visit them for about two years.
Before the flood my dad (a chemist by training) spent much of his time testing for oxygen and phosphorus in the lake.
Knowing I wanted to photograph the debris from the flood, he walked around the flood zone and took photos, then sent me batches of images and reports from his outings. These are collected in a book we made.
By the time I was able to return, most of the debris from the flood had been collected in piles. The height of the grass on what used to be the lake was a measure of how long I'd been away, and of how much time passed since my wife's diagnosis.
Other pictures span ten years, from before and after the flood.