Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [47]
Lying in the dark, trying to ignore the valerian stench, I wonder how I’ll do when the baby arrives. Whenever people find out we hope to deliver at home, someone invariably brings up the fact that I am a registered nurse and have worked as an emergency medical responder for twenty years. “You’ll be fine!” they say. Then I tell them that in all those years, I have never seen a baby born, let alone delivered one. The only babies I’ve ever caught emerged from a pair of truncated plastic hips strapped to a library table during our biannual emergency responder testing. Those babies are plastic, and their umbilical cords are attached with a metal snap. Anneliese has stacks of beautifully written home birth books she wants me to read, but so far I’ve spent most of my time reviewing the very straightforward illustrations included in the obstetrics chapter of Nancy Caroline’s Emergency Care in the Streets.
I spent four years in a fine nursing school, but my maternity rotation was a bust. Every time I went to the hospital, I got all prepped and ready, but never once was a baby born on my shift. The only significant experience I recall was when my instructor asked a woman who had already given birth if she would agree to allow a student nurse to perform her “five-point checks.” Five-point checks are an examination performed on the mother in the hours following childbirth to detect any abnormalities or problems. Three of the five points qualify as personal and specific, and a uterus massage is included.
“Hi,” I said, walking into the room. “I’m here to do your five-point checks.” The woman’s eyes widened.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your student nurse.”
“Oh. My. God.”
I retreated half a step. “If you’d rather…”
“I said I didn’t mind a student nurse, but I…” She trailed off. Then she took a deep breath and rolled her eyes. “Oh, what the hell,” she said, hiking up her gown. “It’s my third kid. Get it over with.”
These mornings as soon as breakfast is finished and before I head up to the office, Amy and I collect maple sap. It’s a small operation—just six buckets on four trees—and it doesn’t take long to make the rounds. Amy bounds ahead, eager to lift each lid and gauge the overnight accumulation. While I dump the clear sap into buckets, Amy touches her finger to a droplet hanging from the tap, breaking the surface tension so it melts across her fingertip before she licks it clean. We’ve got a pretty good deal going here—a couple named Jan and Gale have all the equipment and do the boiling. They have agreed to give us half the syrup in exchange for allowing them to tap the trees. All we have to do is gather the sap and store it in two plastic barrels. When the barrels are full, it is Amy’s job to call Jan and Gale and tell them so.
We’ve had a good stretch of weather for the sap run—warm, sunny days, freezing at night—and when Amy lifts the galvanized lids she finds most of the hanging buckets are full and capped with a crust of cloudy white ice. Sometimes when we get to the last tree, however, there is only an inch or two of frozen sap at the bottom of the bucket. Amy backs off and shakes her head at