Baby Due Date

22nd May 2011 Sunday

When our friends have left and are on the train back to London my husband and I lie on our bed. He sleeps and I read the Sunday papers. I feel unsettled and find it hard to slip back into the fabric of my life.

I should be tired - after breakfast and a visit to the allotment we swarm all over the beds like worker bees, lugging watering cans from the tank again and again, soaking the onions and the cabbages, the tomatoes and the red currant bushes, the apricot trees and the broad beans. I pick pink sticks of rhubarb for them to take home. Later the wind gets up we walk and talk in Killerton woods where the wild garlic has been cut back and the rhododendrons are pale purple flashes in amongst the beech and oak trees.

We only have an hour for lunch before they have to leave so we tuck into big bowls of coconut lentil dhal, grilled salmon fillets and salad and left over lemon polenta cake and rhubarb cooked with elderflower from Friday night’s supper. I make them up a parcel of chocolate brownies and flapjacks for them to eat on the train.

While I wash up I go over the weekend in my mind, unraveling our time together, remembering them these last few days and also how we were all those years ago before we knew what we know now.

All day I’ve been thinking about my nephew and his wife whose baby was due today. But he doesn’t know it is 22nd May. He’ll come when he’s ready, like a sweet ripe strawberry.