January

published: 2010-01-07

Snow. It’s dusting outside, is what a little girl says. She is six years old. She has never seen snow. Her mother laughs, tells her to come outside quick. The dustflakes melt on her flushed and confused face. Mother opens her arms and twirls. Little girl opens her mouth and tastes. They aren’t wearing jackets. She remembers, because father takes a picture of them and thirty years later she looks at that photo. She wonders whether she’d make her son put on a jacket. She knows she would. And she then realizes: she loves the mother she thought she never loved. It is right there, in that one singular moment just before her brother comes out to throw a snowball at her.
Will her son love her, she wonders, for making him wear a jacket the first time he sees snowflakes fall from the sky? And he runs outside, while she stays inside and waves?

December

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October

September

August

July

June

May