I Googled You
by Amy Roberts
“The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” - Maya Angelou
“How did you find us . . . find me?” she said, the trepidation in her voice manifested in her restless hands, her inability to make direct eye contact.
“I googled you,” I replied.
“It was that easy?”
“Laughably easy. I had the name and basic geography.”
“So, you just googled me?”
“Pretty much. Some of it was odd intuition. The universe at play, like it wanted me to find you. The connections came so fast. Forty-five minutes googling and there you were.”
“But, how did you know it was me?”
“Facebook photo, you in profile. I turned the laptop towards my husband. He looked at your profile, it was my profile. ‘Yup’, he said, ‘that’s your mother.”
Inked lists impressed by a typewriter onto eight yellowed, heavy sheets of paper, are all of the family history that I had for thirty-eight years. I kept them hidden, protected in a locked, fire safe box, out of sight, not out of mind.
96