Family, and Snow

I'm watching two scenes at once.

My window view whispers snows to come and the stillness winter brings to my heart. I remember deep, full snows I loved to rush through when I was young.

On my television is a young woman searching for her family.

Her parents take her to their home, trying to explain what could have shaped them so completely. This young woman is fighting to understand how her parents survive under the Khmer Rouge, and Pol Pot. How did her parents, who met during those days, become the married couple who raised her in America?

Her parents keep looking around themselves, making sure Khmer Rouge don't see them explaining what happened in the camps they visit. Her Mother is still so scared, so completely resistant to dredging this up. Her father shows her the grave of his mother, where the Khmer Rouge deposited her next to the latrines. They are crying together in this place, and she begins to understand just how much has been lost. A father, looking out over the grounds of places he knew, as his daughter tries to sleep away the nightmares of faceless Khmer Rouge following her since childhood. She doesn't understand the depth of fear and hate her father feels, as they pull into a village where Khmer Rouge still live. She realizes that her parents were forced to marry under the Khmer Rouge.

I am lulling myself into peace and rest, and I am watching a woman confront the fears of her Father, the fears of her faceless nightmares. I don't know what to think, to say. A Khmer Rouge woman offers this American woman a plate of food. She doesn't know why, but she rejects this food. My fingers brush the window sill and I wonder, quietly, what I would do if offered food from someone who would have killed me.

They walk at night along the path where her Father smuggled 3 children, a pregnant woman and himself into Thailand. A woman he had never known, children not his own, and he also retreived another Aunt and precious family possessions over 4 trips back and forth through Khmer Rouge territory. Proving how much he cared for the stranger who became his wife, he continued in his quiet loving way to support the family he had made.

Her Father cries as they talk about him carressing her at night, not letting mosqitoes bite his baby. There were no elders to perform the good luck ceremony over this new baby girl, and her Father weeps when he admits it could not be done. She arranges a ceremony for herself, to give her Father the comfort that his daughter receives the blessing he could not give her after her birth. Her Father beams with pride, and my heart wanders to my Father.

I think of my Dad, his face shining and a mixture of pride and pain on my wedding day. I don't know what he thought as he joined my hand to my husband and asked Jon to take care of me as I would take care of him.

As the film ends, I consider the cold and quiet of the snow. The goal of the Khmer Rouge was to wipe clean the history of Cambodia and try to create the culture anew. Something in me stirs, rebelling against the idea. I consider the depth I feel in the winter, the memories hidden within each snow flake as it falls. There are too many thoughts engulfing my silence as I continue through my day. So many goals, so many things to do. Still, I think of my love of snow... and what it means standing next to a swelteringly warm country where someone uncovered the story of her family through years of pain, running, and bravery.