Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry came into this world at 2:19 p.m. on September 13, 2007after almost 60 hours of labor, weighing in at 9 lbs. 2 oz. Olive was determined to make an immediate splash, which she did by making her mother’s water break at five o’clock in the morning on September 11. Olive’s due date was September 5 so technically she was a week late, although obviously the due date is an artificial construct of a society that wishes to control this most uncontrollable of events. But this artificial due date would come to influence Olive’s birth immensely. Because she was “late” she was not allowed to be delivered in a nice quiet birthing center suite with a big tub and a double bed, kind of like a cheap room in a Ramada Inn redone Laura Ashley style. This was the first in a series of maddeningly arbitrary decisions which were forced upon Olive by the hospital which made her life much more difficult, and seemed to be motivated by fear of litigation rather than the safety and well-being of Olive. So Olive had to be born in the madness of the delivery room of the hospital proper, and by the time she was born, it was so crowded there were women literally going into labor in the hallway.

Well, we did it. We put all of our stuff into boxes, hired burly man to put them in a giant truck, stuffed our most valuable (mismatched socks, my mother’s ashes) stuff into our Rav 4 and waved goodbye to our life in San Rafael California, where the sun shines all the time, and the deer are so friendly that we frequently found them rummaging through our refrigerator when they had the munchies. Packing, for me, after several months of doing it, was a source of almost unspeakable horror. the more I packed, and more than was to pack, one pile would disappear and 2 more would rear their heads. It was like a dream you have where you’re running as hard as you can, but you’re not getting any closer to the house where those men are molesting your girlfriend, or whatever particular thing you run towards in your dreams.