I know why my mom turned her face to the sun. In her 64 years of life, well, I know from the 35 years she shared with me, that whenever a ray of sun pierced through an otherwise imperfect atmosphere, her chin went up, her eyes closed, and her cheek opened to its warm touch. She was born and raised in the Netherlands, and in the mere four years I have now resided here, I feel my own head tilt, my neck stretch out, the very surface of my skin lifting in appeal when I feel those rays. Neither she nor I are strangers to sunshine. She birthed me in the Arabian desert; later I grew in the Great Plains of North America, where crushing, blizzard-filled winters contrasted with blazing, big-sky, mosquito summers. I believed I despised sunshine. Here in the Netherlands, though, it’s a week into June: the air, while cloudless and bright, pulls on my arms with chilling strokes. The building I’m in is built for insulation—keeping out the beating winter, but also the meager daylight. As I exit into the parking lot, the wind blows across the blue sky, tearing my expectations, or hallucinations, of the warm season. So I slow my steps. The less I move, the less the wind is able to find me. The car has been warming all day into a box that would cause certain death in Texas, but here is a den where the wind can’t reach. I arrive at the kids’ school for pickup, and now remembering to remain still, I open the window. The sun shines in. I dare not move lest a waft of chilling breeze senses my presence. I’m safe, though. I extend my neck as my mother always demonstrated; tilt my head, lift my cheek. There. I’ve captured it. I turn up the greatest song of all time—Zeppelin’s Over the Hills and Far Away—wave at the friendly bus driver, who knows me as the only mom who openly blasts rock music, and close my eyes. Ten minutes of pure solar absorption. Now I know. I wish I could tell her.