For years, I thought my grandmother’s postcards were just a quaint, puzzling tradition — one postcard every birthday, each bearing a faded photo and a handful of strange letters carefully underlined.
But the day I stumbled upon them again, tucked inside a dusty glass jar two decades after her passing, everything changed. Those postcards weren’t mere keepsakes; they were pieces of a secret puzzle my grandmother had left behind — a hidden path that would unravel my understanding of family, identity, and my own history.
Every birthday, without fail, a postcard would arrive from my grandmother. Yellowed with age and edges softened by time, each one carried a peculiar charm and a mystery I never quite understood.
By my seventeenth birthday, I had collected seventeen of them. Then, just a month later, she was gone. The postcards were boxed away, and the box quietly vanished into the depths of my closet.
Twenty years later, while sorting through the remnants of my childhood home, I rediscovered that box — or rather, the postcards, now carefully stored inside a glass jar. My eyes caught the underlined letters sprinkled across the cards. Arranged in sequence, they spelled out a message: LOOK IN THE CEDAR HOPE CHEST. BOTTOM.
With trembling hands, I obeyed. Beneath the weight of worn quilts and lace lay a sealed folder, topped with a note written in her unmistakable handwriting: “Read these when you’re ready to learn who I truly was.”
What I found inside shook me to my core. Zahra — the woman I’d always called Grandma — was, in truth, my biological mother. She had fled Iran, devastated and alone after losing the man she loved. In a refugee camp, she gave birth to me, then entrusted my care to distant relatives in America for my safety. Years later, she returned, disguised as a nanny, quietly raising me in the shadows, unable to reveal her true identity to the world.
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