One night, as low clouds hugged the valley, I curled us—my unborn child and me—into our nest of blankets and imagined all the animals in the forest doing the same, bedding down, curving into warmth. I considered how some forest mothers felt their babies kick within them just as I did, how others nursed and nurtured and protected their offspring just as I would. I thought about all the life beginning, enduring, and ending around me, from the biggest bear to the tiniest insect, to the seed and the bud and the blossom.
