Autumn

The intense unrelenting cramping slowed sometime overnight, and is at least is back down to a more familiar level of discomfort. That really wore me out (I know, I know, I don't know anything)-- but I finally asked it to either step up and be real or let me sleep. I finally slept.

Today I am tired but ok, the weather is magnificent beyond description-- the bluest sky I've ever seen, dazzling sunlight, cold, delicious.

I hope to walk to the end of my road and back- but with

Doug, not without him. I am not feeling so brave as to walk that far alone.

I only know one thing: This baby will arrive before the end of the second week of November.

I am both SO CURIOUS and so not wanting to rush it. Unless I am crampy like that and then, well, yes, I am more ready in those moments of discomfort.

I used to go to the Putney School in Putney Vermont-- 2 years that saved me-- and today is their annual harvest festival. In the old days, back when I thought I could eat wheat- I would go nearly every year to eat cider doughnuts at the local apple orchard, eat apple pie and pumpkin pie at the vendor stalls, and wander in the crowd both hoping to see and hoping not to see anyone I knew. I would walk always to the top of watertower (a long sloping hillside pasture with a magnificent view of Mt. Monadnock), and sit with the cows there, away from people, and just soak up the beauty of vermont in Autumn. (The top image is from a few years back from about most of the way down watertower, the barn is the Putney School barn-- yes, a real working farm).

This year I dare not go for obvious reasons - so we've made a plan to go next year with the little one-- our first scheduled planned-for family outing (I know there will be a million in between)-- but it was a bizarre moment where I projected into the future and saw me, and a baby, out in the world.

IF is a funny thing (HA, not so much)-- it makes Everything feel uncertain. Life is uncertain, I know, but to be plagued with knowing that in every moment really sucks the fun out of so many things. IF makes it easier to see failure as a probable outcome than success, and it is really hard to leave that sticky pile of shit behind, even on the cusp of a birth of a baby that is inside me right now. I still feel as if I am being cocky if I think this will actually work out, hope I have not jinxed things, one quiet baby day and all hell breaks loose inside me-- what if I lose?

I miss optmisitiKate. The one who assumed that All Will Be Well. I will try to find her on my walk today, in the low grade cramping, in the movement of this miracle baby, in my waddling roundness, in the countdown to our due date, in our making plans for next year, in this moment and in the next and in the next. Mindful and deliberate returning over and over to some semblance of optimism, or at least neutrality.

I'll go outside and watch the leaves fall, and try to see beauty instead of loss.

The lesson I learn again and again and again from the turning of the seasons is of beauty and its many forms, and nearly none of them stagnant.