| She had already lived there in that tiny town for a few years when we first met. Our family had just moved the year before to a newly-built house further out from town. Kate and I worked together on a volunteer program which was intended to bring some exposure to the arts into the rural school district. We became friends over art and parenting, sharing hopes and concerns for our children. We were very young, hippies at heart and matrons in reality. It was a fine and difficult time, a time it seemed to me when possibilities were all there, only daily minutiae still needed to be worked out. Sometimes Kate and I trekked into the city to the museums, discussing afterwards over lunch our ideas for bringing "all this" back to our childrens' classrooms. We talked about a lot of other things too. Gradually, our lives became known to each other. Naturally, we talked about our pregnancies. When this one was born, such and such. And the second one, so different from the first. Things like that. She had wanted to do natural childbirth with all three of her babies, but her husband was gone so often, she had to ask a good friend, a neighbor, to be her coach. The last time Kate and I had one of these long discussions about pregnancies, she told me there had been a baby earlier, who had died. Actually, she had miscarried. |
