Saturday, October 15, 2:00 PM. Amy.

Everybody’s taking a nap, even Brewer. That’s not unusual. It was cool last week, but when it’s hot in the afternoons—it was 94° yesterday and 97° a few days ago—no one feels like being outside. We do a lot of physical work in the mornings, so much more then we ever did in the old days, and a siesta ends up making a lot of sense. It gives me time to get things done with no kids (or husband) underfoot, or to have quality alone time, as I am now.

This week I harvested the tomatoes at the old house. They are so, so good. We’ve had so few fresh fruit or vegetables since this all started, and you simply would not believe how wonderful these taste. I have never been especially partial to tomatoes, but I ate one like an apple yesterday. But then, maybe that’s the pregnancy talking.

I harvested the squash a couple of weeks ago. I’ll go back over and pick the peppers in another week or two. I’m concerned it may get cold before the pumpkins are ready.

Charlottesville is so overgrown. You drive through town and everything has meadow grass growing out of it: not only people’s yards, not only the business lawns, but the sidewalks and the streets have foot-tall weeds sticking out of every crack. You can’t even see where the train tracks lie—it’s a goatee of grass slicing across the road. The fire station door has so much ivy growing over it, you couldn’t get in if you wanted to. There is a huge tree limb lying right through the middle of Main Street, and you have to inch around it. Every street looks like an abandoned parking lot, leaves strewn everywhere and dust swirled into little piles. The town is a forest waiting to happen. And we, gliding through in our silver SUV, feel like invaders.

I want to say it feels like holy ground, and sometimes it does, like the spirits of the blessed departed are smiling soft sunshine down upon us.

Sometimes it feels like unholy ground, thick with ghouls and demons and the bitter ghosts of the lost, hiding around each corner, just out of sight. The shadows under the trees curl their sneering lips at us. The wind growls, the skittering gravel threatens.

At other times there are no ghosts, only the machinery of nature consuming itself without consciousness or purpose, idly devouring the last vestiges of man. Sic transit gloria mundi.

I don’t like going to Charlottesville anymore.

We came back from town a different way. I wanted to see what things were like in Kelli’s old neighborhood. We noticed a flock of chickens idling at one edge of a cornfield beside an old tractor. At first I thought we’d better go home and come back later with the whole family to round them up, but Trevor insisted we could do it ourselves.

He was right. We both got jabbed by the roosters and pecked and scratched by the hens, but Trevor was brave, and so was I, and we had them all packed up in the back of the SUV in 45 minutes. We had fresh eggs this morning—fresh tomatoes and fresh eggs! If we can keep these chickens alive and let them make a round of chicks or two, we can have fresh chicken meat in a year or two.

There’s another sentence I never thought I’d say. And it pretty well summarizes the general shape of our hopes and dreams these days.

The baby is due in five more months. I was thinking yesterday how it should be about the time for my first ultrasound. They would tell me whether the baby that’s being made by my thirty-seven-year-old body is getting formed correctly. They might be able to tell us the sex.

I miss the assurance that comes from those appointments. I have to remind myself that most women throughout history had no such assurances and most of them got by just fine. Except for the 25% who didn’t and died in childbirth.