Martha June Sizemore, age 12, had never seen snow before December 12, 1919. She'd grown up in the deepest hollows of West Virginia

Martha June Sizemore, age 12, had never seen snow before December 12, 1919. She'd grown up in the deepest hollows of West Virginia, where winters were harsh but her family's cabin was so sheltered that heavy snow rarely reached them. Martha had heard about snow, had seen thin ice on creek beds, but had never witnessed actual snowfall. 

On December 12, 1919, Martha stood in the doorway of her husband's cabin—a one-room structure in a coal mining camp—and watched snow fall for the first time. It was beautiful. White flakes drifting down silently, covering the muddy mining camp in clean white, transforming the ugliest landscape Martha had ever seen into something magical. Martha stepped outside, tilted her face up to catch snowflakes on her tongue, laughed with pure childlike joy at the sensation. For thirty seconds, Martha June Sizemore was simply a 12-year-old girl experiencing something wonderful. For thirty seconds, she forgot she was pregnant. She forgot she was married. She forgot the man three times her age who slept beside her every night. She forgot the baby growing inside her that would come in February, when she was still 12. She was just a child seeing snow for the first time, laughing at the magic of white falling from the sky.

Martha's husband, Clem Sizemore, age 45, watched from the doorway as his child bride laughed at the snow. Clem felt nothing—not tenderness at seeing his wife's innocence, not guilt at having married a child, not shame at having impregnated a 12-year-old girl. Clem had married Martha because he needed someone to cook and clean and bear children. Martha's father had offered her for $30 and a promise of coal company work. The transaction had taken five minutes. Martha wasn't consulted. She was a child. Children didn't get consulted about being sold to men old enough to be their grandfathers. Martha had been brought to Clem's cabin on a Tuesday, told she was married, and that night Clem had taken what he considered his right as a husband. Martha had screamed. Clem had told her to be quiet. Martha was 12 years old and didn't understand what was happening to her body, only that it hurt terribly and the man was heavy and rough and didn't care that she was crying. Martha got pregnant within weeks—her body responding to violation with pregnancy before she'd even begun to understand what had happened to her.

Martha June Sizemore gave birth on February 14, 1920, at age 12—Valentine's Day, though no one in the mining camp acknowledged such holidays. The birth was difficult—Martha's body was too young, too small, too undeveloped for childbearing. A midwife delivered the baby, a girl they named Rose. Martha held Rose against her chest, this tiny person who had come from her body, and felt something fierce and protective that she'd never felt before. Martha loved Rose with desperate intensity—the kind of love that only someone who had been unloved and unprotected can give. Martha swore silently that Rose would never be sold to an old man. Rose would never be a child bride. Rose would have the childhood Martha never got. Martha didn't know how she'd protect Rose—she was 12 years old, married to a brutal man, living in a mining camp with no education, no money, no power. But she swore it anyway, holding her newborn daughter on Valentine's Day, the snow still falling outside, the same beautiful snow Martha had laughed at two months earlier now just cold and white and indifferent.

Martha June Sizemore lived until 1971, dying at age 64. She kept her promise to baby Rose. When Rose was 11, Martha found a way to send her to live with a distant relative in Ohio—told Clem that Rose had gone to school, which was partially true. Martha sacrificed her relationship with her own daughter to save Rose from the fate Martha had suffered. Rose grew up in Ohio, went to school, married at 22 (not 12), had children of her own, lived a normal life. Rose never knew until 1970—one year before Martha's death—that her mother had been 12 when she married, 12 when Rose was born, that Martha had been a child bride herself. Martha told Rose the truth on her deathbed, crying, saying: "I was 12 when they sold me to Clem. I was 12 when you were born. I sent you away to save you from what happened to me. I'm sorry I lied. I'm sorry I sent you away. But I'd do it again. I'd do anything to make sure you got the childhood I didn't get. Did you have a good childhood, Rose? Did you get to be a child?" Rose held her dying mother's hand and said: "Yes, Mama. I had a wonderful childhood. Because of you. Because you protected me." Martha smiled, closed her eyes, and died. She'd kept her promise. Rose had gotten a childhood. Martha had sacrificed everything—her daughter's presence, her own happiness, decades of separation—to give Rose what she never had. The girl who had laughed at snow at age 12, pregnant and married and already destroyed, had saved her daughter from the same destruction. That was Martha June Sizemore's legacy—not survival, but protection. Not living for herself, but ensuring her daughter could live the life Martha never got.