Halloween.

The sweet sugar smell of candy corn and the warm orange glow of carved pumpkins.

Crunchy acorns underfoot.

Neighborhood children shrieking and throwing burnt-gold leaves.

Every year these small things take me back to an autumn night 34 years ago.

I remember that afternoon, how we spent the first stages of labor hurriedly carving pumpkins on the front porch.

Later, on the way to the hospital, seeing the children trick-or-treating on the sidewalks of our little town.

And I remember my husband pulling up at a stoplight and noticing that the driver in the car next to us was a demented clown with blood running out of his eyes.

He turned and waved with a creepy grin, and it all seemed perfectly normal to me.

I was just trying to remain calm through the contractions, all the while wondering if we would have a little pumpkin-headed Halloween baby.

And it progressed quickly – so fast that when he was born the umbilical cord became wrapped around his tiny neck.

His tiny body was turning blue and there was a moment of fear. But the midwife calmly instructed me to remain still and to just exhale slowly.

And even though I was scared, I took a few deep, even breaths.

It felt like each of us in the room was holding our lungs for those few seconds.

And the shared oxygen in the small space felt condensed, vital and rare, pulsing with the pure essentials of life.

I waited for this new being to take his own breath. And then finally he was free and the there was a collective sense of deep relief.

Anyone who witnesses childbirth knows this to be true: no matter how planned or orchestrated it is, there is always an element outside of your control.

And while breathing through contractions may seem lame, it is the main sure thing for opening the body and allowing life to take over.

Anyway, every year at this time it strikes me what a crazy thing having a child is.

How even though it is an everyday human act, it is a profoundly mystical thing. The moment when one body becomes two.

One soul divides into another one.

At the mercy of my body but also empowered by it too, conscious and aware but mostly borne along by ancient evolution.

The Native Americans believe that the eagles and hawks are Spirits from beyond. They fly between earth and heaven as conduits of wisdom and the Divine.

I visualize the hawk’s journey, an exhausting trek of purpose and intent, and it seems like we humans also ride the winds of time, dependent upon our fragile, tenuous bodies to move us.

With no wings to carry us, only our bracken bones.

Yet we ride the great buffeting winds that connect us.

We can’t live up there in the great expanse, but it exists for us as a connector to the rest of the universe.

In the way my son was born on my own ragged exhale and tired push of uterine muscle.

How he was pulled onto this planet, into this delicate ecosystem that is home.

The word raptor comes from the root verb rapere, to be seized in ecstasy. It’s a bizarre image.

A miracle.

How similar that seems to childbirth. Indescribable and paradoxical and unapologetically painful, bound up in a soulful mystery.

Today it only resides within memory.

And today maybe that’s the best way my body has to recall this story, to try to write it down as I go, breath-by- breath, remembering.