The heat breaks the same day Katie finally comes. To her it still is a monster, the beaked salt runs of humidity hang from her chin, pool in the crevices and spaces around our necks and eyes–she calls it Maryland heat and I make no mention how odd to me it is that nearby as Connecticut where she’s from there are no dog days of 110plus with the index. I try not to emphasize yes as already said, this heat is actually already broken~

Down the peninsula they speak of Connecticut with a tilt in the voice, call it in the North.

We take a brief roadtrip the second day she’s here and follow the back end of a storm most of the way. Meeting it same time we’d left Chincoteague and those fabulous heady tacos we went all the way there just to get. We kept on down the peninsula just barely catching up with it before it would end up miles ahead again. I liked this spotty Timing, we stopped for Fabrics but more for the lore and spent an hour and that helped us stay just behind the storm–me not naming aloud how antsy I feel seeing the iron sky always just ahead. Weather has never touched my nerves like this but being a new mom has made me in many spots my own foreign territory, a constant oddity or new surprise to myself. On a good day how to be a diplomat to myself. On a not good or blah one how to just try and take care of me and baby’s health.

Before we left it was breezy, gray, the empty open grayness that makes me appreciate breath, especially tree breath and it was a day for this, in through the windows in the upstairs back. Also that is what I mean the heat broke, it maybe was mid 80’s but it was gulf wind breezy on the farm especially under where the willow sways. Quiet and calm. 2004 on the Oregon Coast comes back to me when I lived there: Willow Street I would tell people, that’s what I’ll name my farm. Also, as I write, I realize the angels are near~it comes back to me that when I am in active labor the first two hours of pushing me and Tom would breathe then I’d go deep within to this place where Mike Shue met me, it was on the Oregon Coast, not on Fishing Rock though further down, Strawberry or Neptune beach south of Yachats anyway. I’d contract, then disappear to Mike where we sat waiting for me cliffside at this mudred picnic bench in the yellow dirt ahead of us the sea deep black and so ethereal the navy blue. The white caps making for grey against the grey sky. We spoke steadily the music of our laughter from him getting me the way I am getting him distracting me enough to ensure for me that though it be tough I will make it through this labor all the way. We would laugh in the background of my head then resume a dull din of conversation when I return to the topside world~it is serious and long in the catching up to talk this way with him all while human-life-I-do-not-understand tries over and over to rip its way through old me and into this world~and so now when Oregon Coast comes back to me–it is me calling back the me of Giving Birth.

She Who Can.

Further into Virginia because she feels the legacy up from the earth-living-timewarp Katie and me talk lengthy about this Place. Mason-Dixon south, tidal peninsula bioregion bays and marshlands and cypress swamps animism and the Chesapeake whose heart is this Soul, the underground Narrative cryptic and always waking or hitting snooze no matter what, Always Here in the Dreamtime touchable anytime you Gooooo. We journey through history further South we drive. The confederate flag at the gas station the instant you cross the State line.

When we finally get to the Motel it is after we’ve greeted the Bay. Even though we motor both restaurants in town aren’t serving by the time we get back out after I’ve fed and cleaned up the baby and myself and Kate her own tidying up. We come home our home for the night in time for our favorite movie starting on basic cable, a blessed and happy surprise. My daughter looks at me with so much love I cannot speak and we hold one another and she is content as me, on the road. My heart is made of what it feels like to see her little smiles.

The morning after we make it to the water again, and the breakfast that is a local spot but actually not that good. We feel grateful though for all the grease. It matches the growing already heat. Katie is wowd and obsessed and I keep thinking of the man at the fabric store who loves Jesus and speaks the omen, gives us a wreath made of cotton, which grows on the backroads off 13. It is creepy to me and reminds me of Bones. And that is what it is. Wishing Moon of Harvest comes and I am moved to naturally feel my thanks, even as parts of me drift by in wavy haze. I cannot remember what is Dream and what is Real, we are making and remaking, I am Bone Woman, I return to Who I Never Was, Come From what I have Always Been. I am Old Flesh Torn, Waking Earth Remembering Her True Self. I am New Flesh Disappearing. Eating and Eating the She, the Nothing, the Holy Mom, the One. The Not. Mama comes but so does Henri, she comes and so fast goes again, again again, so do tropical depressions, so do ripping, wowing squalls. There’s not much to see but late Saturday she shines in from baby’s window, and I dance her down and hold myself inside Her, Inside All.

Even though the heat has broke not 10 minutes after we say goodbye Kate gets on the road home and it erupts, raining like total madness mad like the land and the sky have long time been circling each other marking electric radius of who’s who and betrayals and now, finally! They get to connect in assault. The lust! It feels that broody and that much like vengeance, the thunder so pained when it cracks the winds and side-flying wetness so full of noise and energy. Our house leaks, the living room and basement, and the hour long soaking rain that follows all that daytime busting and crashing and thrash is so quietly sated. Relief comes like poison? Sometimes you take the bad medicine as anecdote, what the alchemists would say.

Much as it All is it All washes away, the water, and returns in drops the body makes.

I sing a song of Harvest. A Prayer to Me Whose Always Been & Who Shall Leave, & Return Again. I sing a Harvest Prayer of Unknown and it is ringed in music and heart made soft in absolute mammoth surrender of Love, musical hearts run round and round like wheels on the peninsula road. It is a Song. Like All Songs. Leaves and Comes Back the same, and different than it ever was.