winterville, ga

My water broke late that night. I don’t know what time. It was a couple of weeks before my due date, and I hadn’t felt any labor pains, so it was unexpected. I was panicked, scared and completely ignorant despite the library of books I’d collected on the subject. We were also at my parent’s cabin in the woods of North Georgia, a last weekend fling before everything as we knew it was supposed to change.

We did know enough to get into the car and drive back to town, tires on gravel, a towel between my legs. I couldn’t stop thinking of all we hadn’t done—installing the car seat, the piles of laundry in the basement, unmade casseroles meant to sustain us for the weeks to come. But there was a larger dread underneath it all of what I had not done, what I would not do from this moment on. What of driving from the Continental Divide east across the great plains until the sky swallows you whole? Or drinking Turkish coffee in Sarajevo in a café along Sniper’s alley where there are no gunshots now. Standing in the inner Mongolian desert at dawn. What would that look like? How would I ever find out now?

The light flashed, and he stopped the car. First I thought it was lightning. Then I thought it might be nuclear war. But he just stopped the car and took a picture. I thought he’d lost his mind. I yelled at him to keep moving forward. I told him to take his foot off the fucking brake.

Until he showed me what he saw: a barn. An omen of our nativity.

And in that moment I knew just what it felt like to stand in the inner Mongolian desert at dawn.