All photos by Austin D. Oie Photography

Puppetry by Brianna Sloane and Chris Perez

When my mother was a child, she lived on a mountain and was happy.  She had rosy cheeks and long, straight hair, and she knew the mountain like a friend.  But the day was coming when she would encounter something bigger than herself, and for years afterward would know the feeling of being incomplete in her own skin.

Now it just so happens that on this particular mountain, every year at mid-winter there is a huge feast and a dance that lasts all day and long into the night.  Everyone looks forward to it all year.  The children hardly sleep the night before.  It was at this mid-winter holiday celebration, the year she was eleven and he was twelve, that my mother saw my father for the first time.  My mother looked at my father in that moment with the kind of intuition that only girl children have, and she knew.  She felt from that instant that they belonged to each other.