Mid-summer and I am dreaming of bees. My husband, dream midwife, has given me seven days to ride a horse in my dreams, but I sleep late and wake and forget as my youngest nudges me up, Come, play. In the field adjacent to the house, a hidden stream between us, my husband and oldest son are tending the plants. Music winds its way to me from the little speaker they have brought. I lift my hand to them.

Rural Vermont feels like the shire, my husband says. It blooms full towards autumn ripeness. I prefer fairy lands and secret hovels and hidden cabins in the woods. I prefer bodies of water, long fields, a distance when looking.

I drink coffee and I think of bees. Erotic buzzing, multitudes, queen-ruled, a song like lips making a sound the ear only feels. I walk in the grass barefoot and do no work. I cut wild flowers and place them in a clear glass vase. My husband leaves for work. The two boys have a tea party with mint licorice tea, round crackers, stuffed animals. They hum and bicker and love. They grow hungry, thirsty, tired.

My husband dreamed of a golden horse dancing in the field outside this house the night before our first son was born. We did not live here. His grandfather did at that time. Cavallo means horse in Italian, which is something they also eat in Italy. It is one of our first son’s names, for his grandmother’s line–Italians and for the horse in the field where her mother once lived, June. I knew that he would be irrevocably mine, but I tethered him to Nana in this small way, like a spell. Eventually this magic worked and he dotes on her as she does him.

He was born under the sign of my mother, Aquarius. Like her he is thin, red-haired, original. Moses, is his first name. A name that came to me like a storm that never lifted. No, not Mo or Mose, I would say to my husband. It must be Moses. After he was born and grew, I wondered over the name. Why it possessed me. Why I insisted he carry such a mantle all his life. Mo, I say. Mo, like a quiet place one might find respite.

On and on they go, the two of them creating worlds. For a moment, I listen. They are fetching a pen for “research.” They lose interest. “Want to have a battle?” one asks. “No, I’m doing research,” says the other. “After my research,” he repeats, the word a charm on his tongue. He has no idea what it means, he is only four. Something to do with a pen and paper. I think about what I would like to research: bees, linens, islands, furniture carved of wood, large beds with fluffy pillows, tea that clears the mind.

We leave in two days to travel halfway across the country. To land in the bay of loons. To romp and rollick and read. Sun, water, wave. Tree, bird, stone. Wind. Summer, in the life of teachers: its soft and balmy breeze, its blanket of sun each morning, its long evening flush with fireflies, a scrap of moon above the treetops. The late fire around which we speak of things we would not, by any other light, admit.

I laze and consider the quickness of flies, how I would move if I moved like an ant, what I will make the children for lunch. I do not think of the third child I want. I do not think of the fortune teller’s words. Two children, she said. Perhaps a third, but they might not make it through. I was twenty-something then. Now this phantom child haunts me. I try to call her name: Ruth, June, Jude, Camilla, Matilda, Matisse, Elouise. I imagine if I find her name and sing it out to her she will come. Yes, she. But dare I taunt the gods.

I think of a line of poetry I once wrote: Bee, bee, bee. Once, you called the bee from me.

I make lists. Gratitude. To do. To pack. I make calls. I feed the children. They go on creating worlds–houses made of pillows, chairs in a line become a path to keep their feet from hot lava. Cars, podcasts, horses. Dragons. Stones. Scrap of blanket balled up and smelling of the blackberries they picked from the yard.

We moved to this house two years ago and have been slow to make it our own as we do not own the house. This spring I dug up the grass and planted a garden. My husband began farming the field. I made a rock garden and planted flowers. We cristened a fire pit in the early spring air. Each season here like a thickening emotion, a scent I call forth in my mind–always, the way it feels occupies me most.

Though I have avoided this out of a sense of fear and anxiety, my first book will come into the world this September. Its birth, a long coil of labor, a fierce abandon-ing of allegiances for truth, a hope of another world, a whisper at my ear–this is what birth feels like, which is what Peggy, my midwife whispered to me during the birth of my second son. The first had been born by C-section. I am the kind of person who needs a midwife at my ear whispering these words all the day long–this is what it feels like. This life.

Now the bee and the horse and the children still wrapped in their games. Now the turn of the day, the leaving, the work, the labor, the speaking and planning and doing. Now the sun hot in the sky and the field, a green expanse. Now the laundry, the dishes, the organizing, the pitch and purchase of the day.