text: My mother. She was an interesting case. While she was was not perfect, she was important to me. I thank the stars for the time I had with this woman. Unfortunately not all of my memories are good ones. My mother came from a rather wealthy family in the area. When my father, fresh out of university, asked her father for her hand, there was no sign of deliberation or hesitation in his face, not a single thought as he uttered a single word, "yes". At least that is how my father told it. I was born a sick little boy. My mother, had a difficult childbirth which was not uncommon at the time. As my mother was unable to care for me, I was supplied with a nanny of sorts during this time who lived in the servant quarters in the back. She and my mother grew quite close forming a bond that a mother forms for her child. While all this time my father drifted farther away. The last straw was when my nanny removed the nails to the windows in my mother's room. My father had nailed them shut for fear she would toss me out of one. He had the nanny removed that very night. In the morning, the nanny was gone, as was my mother and I. They had taken me to the next county over where they took residence on a small share crop with a one room cabin. This is where I lived until my father rescued me at the age of 12. It is unknown to me whether they were lovers, but I called them both mother. My mothers kept me isolated on the farm most of the time so I had little interaction with other children. They had me convinced that our little plot of dust was the only thing in the world that mattered. There were other farmers whose children seemed to have it all. It is during this time I learned that by that running the backroads until dark, I could run until I couldn't remember. A man was making a house call to a business associate of one of his patrons in the next county over, the one where I lived. He heard from the townspeople of two women on the outskirts of town barely scraping by on a farm with a child. They couldn't say if the child was male or female, only that they were certain had never seen a doctor, let alone a dentist. So, being a man of charity, but not of god, he went to find this “family” to see if he could be of service. I ran and hid behind some bales of straw when I saw the man pull up in his auto. I was scared because I had seen so few cars as well as grown men in my life. My mother (the nanny) was the first to run from the house in tears. She was followed soon after by my mother who looked older than she should. The man was last to leave the house carrying my other set of clothes which he tossed in the bushes after examining them for only enough time to recognise them as the tattered rags they were. He explained to me that he was taking me shopping and to a restaurant, both of which intrigued and frightened me as much as the man leading me to his car. Once a safe distance away, he pulled out a photo from amongst a stack of old papers from the glovebox. It was of the man and my mother and what I assumed to be me as a newborn baby. I could barely tell that the young smiling woman in the photo was the same as the one I watched running from the house. The one who raised me had more wrinkled skin than not from the dirt and sun and toil and poverty. I don't remember how she looked with a smile as that was not how we lived, smiling seemed a luxury of the leisure class that we were not apart of. It didn't take long for me to get used to my new life with my father. After several months my father returned with my mother. She never looked like the woman from the photo again. We never really spoke about these times, only in hushed tones hoping not to remember too much.