Submitted by hannah, who says:
My mom read me the first 4 books before she passed away & Harry Potter was always our thing. Then when the 5th book came out, I didn’t want to read it because I had always associated it with my mom and she wasn’t there to share it with me. But then the 6th book came out, and I picked up the 5th one, read that and then the 6th, and there was no looking back. I remembered why I loved Harry Potter so much. When the 7th book came out, and I read the part about Dumbledore, my mom’s favorite character (and one of my own haha), leaving Harry the snitch in his will, and the message left on it, I knew that this was something special. It always kind of toyed around with it in the back of my head. So then I went for it, and got it, and I love it. It reminds me of my mom, and Harry Potter, and the things she didn’t get to read, but I know she would have loved.
“The Snitch I caught in my first ever Quidditch march?” said Harry. “Don’t you remember?”
Hermione looked bemused. Ron, however, gasped, pointing frantically from Harry to the Snitch and back again until he found his voice.
“THat was the one you nearly swallowed!”
“Exactly,” said Harry, and with his heart beating fast, he pressed his mouth to the Snitch.
It did not open. Frustration and bitter disappointment welled up inside him: He lowered the golden sphere, but then Hermione cried out.
“Writing! There’s writing on it, quick, look!”
He nearly dropped the Snitch in surprise and excitement, Hermione was quite right. Engraved upon the smooth golden surface, where seconds before there had been nothing, were five words written in the thin, slanting handwriting that Harry recognized as Dumbledore’s:
I open at the close.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
