Sylvia

I drew Lake Auburn, and then I drew Androscoggin river next to it, and I drew this because growing up actually grew up in Auburn, but I grew up biking around the lake, and I grew up somewhere where the lake was really protected, like we couldn't touch the water. And so I've just been thinking about how that experience shaped what I thought was the norm, that communities protected their drinking water, that it was a priority. And then when I moved elsewhere, I learned that that wasn't the case. I spent a while lots of different places, but I remember this one experience where I was in Texas, where I was with some friends, and we were trying to stop a tar sands pipeline from being put through the state. And I went to just get a drink of water from their tap, and my friends, like, looked horrified and stopped me before I took a sip, because it wasn't safe to drink. And I just thought about their reality of what water was like, and my reality. And what brought me back to Maine was there was the Androscoggin River was under threat from trying to put a tar sands pipeline through our homeland. And what just gives me hope is I think just one generation being brought up a certain way can really change things and inspire people to protect what's important in their community.