Like so many passages, it begins with water. Not the wide gray water of chopping seas, not pulling tides or rocky shores, not harbors. This water pools on the floorboards beneath me, clear liquid, splashing like an ephemeral fall from my own body, sputtering news of your imminent arrival. Mrs. Blenkinsop trundles across the circle in my direction, it must be her: good round face and ruddy cheeks, summer cloak flapping behind, clutching a leather bag and glass bottle to her ample chest. Her white ruffle cap’s fallen down, showing her woolly hair (holding more to red than gray) swirling in a great bun, illuminated by the tender sun of the late summer morning. When she opens her mouth to speak, I see that her teeth are crooked and yellow, and that she resists smiling because of it. But her eyes are insensibly kind—a primordial mud-green, like a flashing creek after a storm, with twigs and leaves, sediment and rain all mixed together, flecks of light dancing on its rippling surface. Detritus, and all that is necessary for life.

Which is enough to set us on our long, strange journey together.

At the start she warns me that I won’t be relieved of my load anytime soon, though she assures me I’ll be safely delivered, head foremost, and all is as it ought to be. Some part of me believes in this seasoned midwife so thoroughly that when she announces your sex (with no fanfare at all) I am won to it like a trumpet call—réveillez-vous! “Awake!” she says to me, to the daughter who stirs within. In an instant you spring from my imagination, entire. Never mind those who espouse the art of getting pretty girl babies, who would’ve had me gaze on cherry lips and lily-whites throughout my pregnancy, sitting quietly doing needlepoint, taking care not to think thoughts at all. Indeed, many in my state take up the cause of a nursery in the months before their confinement, if not the refurbishment of an entire house, always with an urgency that resides in our most primitive animal natures. Burrow deep, spin a steel-silk orb, feather the nest. For my part I cannot unpack a trunk without a thought bounding in, a rush to nearby fields and forests, a cold lake-bath, or the desk, the paper, the pen. There is no confinement that can hold me, no drawing of the curtains, but wide-open windows throwing fresh country light across the page, illuminating the blackest ink.