"The Quickening"

I wanted to give you the best parts of my love for your father—how we rented a house in a tiny town in northern Connecticut, that summer I was pregnant with you, and lay on a big white bed listening to the wail of the trains and the patter of rain on the creek and imagined it falling on the blue tarp covering the hot-dog stand across the road. We ate hamburgers at a roadside shack and swam in Cream Hill Lake, where the teenage lifeguards almost kicked us out because we weren’t members. We barely deserved that deep blue water, those shores thick with trees, those wooden buoys dappled with sunshine. We’d had our whispered resentments, our nights of fighting. But I want you to picture us there: our voices bantering, our laughter entwined. I want you to know you were built from medium-rare meat and late-afternoon light.

Wow.