Snow

I knew the snow was going to be a problem from the moment I woke up.  My mom hated the snow and I often wasn’t allowed to go outside when the grass glistened with white instead of green.  I think the very fact I wasn’t able to play in the snow like my friends and neighbors started my fascination with it all.  A fascination I had to completely hide from my mother.  Even reading a book about snowmen or cutting out paper snowflakes would send her into a frenzy.  While she loved the sun, its heat, and cold weather equally, there was something about the snow that seemed to touch a nerve. 

But there was really no one I could ask about why she felt this way about the snow.  By the time I was thirteen, I decided I needed to find out about my mother’s history and why she didn’t love the snow as much as I did.  Or at least find out why she wouldn’t tell me anything about her past and her family.  I had never so much as met another family member and whenever I asked about grandparents and cousins and who my father was, she suddenly remembered an errand she needed to run.  Or how she had forgotten to turn the stove off. 

Buoyed by a school librarian who let me use the computers after school and pretended to be doing homework when most of the time I was researching my past, I was hoping to find more about my mom. I had never realized how much information was out there, until I learned about databases and I would never have found out about my mother. Or my father. My brothers, my sisters and all the cousins I never knew about. I hadn’t known I had been kidnapped.