The Deep, Deep Snow

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The first thing you should know about me is that I believe in signs. Omens. Premonitions. I grew up believing that things happen for a reason.

That’s the only way to explain why I’m alive.

You see, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who I am, because I don’t know where I came from. I’m a mystery to myself.

I was born in late October or early November, but I don’t know the exact day. When I was five years old, I picked October 31 for my party. Halloween. I thought that would make for a cool birthday.

Whatever the real day was, I was left on Tom Ginn’s doorstep when I was about a week old. His house used to be a church, with a white steeple and a wall of stained glass windows. At night, in the darkness, my birth mother probably thought it was still a church, and I guess that’s where you take a baby you’re planning to abandon.

She left me in an old Easter basket, strangely enough, nestled among green paper curly-cues like a white-chocolate bunny. I was dressed in a cotton onesie with faded pink stripes and a bonnet with flaps tied in a bow under my chin. The temperature outside was thirty-nine degrees. Obviously I don’t remember that night, but sometimes I think about what it must have been like to be alone, freezing, crying, with no idea what I had done to be cast away. She left no note to tell me why.

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