A girl grows up in a radioactive hometown. Her bloodline intertwines with rivers and streams that have been polluted with toxic waste. She's raised by a village of women who, like the water, remember everything. She learns resilience from generations of single mothers, waitresses, teachers, secretaries, nurses, artists, dancers, and witches. A woman faces grief, death, illness, joy, love, and interdependence like a poet lost in prayer, or a natural scientist, one who studies mushrooms, which "transform toxicity into tenderness." She writes her way through the mud and the muck. She imagines the freedom of breaking the cycle.