seventeen weeks

The grass is green and covered with dew. Early morning spring, still hushed, broken only by trilling song of birds and the lazy roll of wind through undressed branches, tips brightening to green from winter grey. It is here I contemplate you-- what little of you there is, and all of you there will be.

I palm the fruit, plump and firm, cradling it in my grasp. A seemingly inconsequential item, this pear. A rather ordinary fruit. Bland, compared to an orange, or a mango, or an apple. But special, nonetheless. Especially today, of all days, on this crisp spring morning where I'm awake, and you're awake, and it seems it's only us and the birds on this earth at this time. And that's how I want it.

Bringing the fruit to my lips I inhale the delicate aroma, brushing the skin with my lips, caressing as if it's you. For, in a way, it is.

Already today is unlike the others. It's a day more special than most. Today I awoke, trailed the tips of my fingers down my throat, along my breasts, down to my swelling belly. My body no longer resembles that of a girl, nor even that of a woman, but that of a goddess coming to form. It is a transformation brought on by you, nestled deep within, snuggled tight to all things warm and wet.

But today, I felt you.

We've been together seventeen weeks. One hundred twenty days. My awareness of your presense not as long; my yearning for you much longer. Already I feel like we've been through lifetimes, strung together through stars and planets and all the dust between. You are the greatest thing by far in my life, the largest being in my mind, occupying the entirety of my thoughts, and yet you are no larger than this pear I cup in my hands. You have no influence in this world, save for the tiny flutter I felt this morning as I lay there waiting for you. I greeted you with my gentle touch, with the soft whisper of my breath, with the constant beat of my heart, and you replied with the slightest nudge. With that barest of movement you brought me to life; awakened the mother from deep within, lying dormant in wait for your arrival.

And you're only the size of a pear.

I taste the fruit, biting into its flesh. With each mouthful I imagine nourishing you, each nutrient moving from me, to you, to grow bigger and stronger. One day we will meet, face to face, nose to nose. I will kiss the skin of your belly, wrap your fingers around mine, lose myself to the study of your toes and how they wiggle. Everything I do is for you, don't you see?

I'm sure you don't. You won't for a while. You won't until it's you, standing in an early spring field, staring into the abyss of everything and nothing, deliberately tied to the past and future and all the generations in between. Only then you will realize how special you are, how important you are, because there will suddenly be more than you. You will touch your own belly and feel yourself and your child, but also your mother, and your grandmother, and all those that carried you before I did, all the love and sacrifice and pain and joy.

With sticky fingers I kneel to the dirt. A patch of blackened earth freshly turned and bare to the world, awaiting new life, as we all are. The earth receives my donation in silent acceptance. I burrow the pit deep within, coccooning it, surrounding it, blanketing it, much as you are within me. From a small unassuming seed a tree will grow, small at first, vulnerable and unsure. But some day its branches will stretch toward the heavens and light the sky with its leaves, bearing fruit for all to feast.

This is for you. It's all for you.

So that some day you may sit beneath your pear tree

And contemplate yourself.

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