Dusk hastily cut through to the fourth hour of the day of the sun.
Unconscious was the four year old Spoon in his bunk, as was the Lieutenant Colonel adjacent with the Major in theirs.
Breaking from her slumber was the Major, her colossal belly throbbing in pain.
Such an ache she had only once experienced with the Spoon.
She lay awake.
Tossing and turning in discomfort,
Her tolerance had soon run dry.
Immediacy and hustle leaked through the home of the expecting family.
The Major hauled her enormity to the Ford Expedition,
The Lieutenant Colonel zipping the Spoon’s snowsuit in preparation for the separation of a heated furnace,
To the Alaskan, April air.
Rapidly dropping the Spoon at day care,
The couple continued the quest dodging and swerving moose on the icy route.
It is still dark.
Dawn seems as if it won’t break soon enough,
To illuminate the path.
The clock strikes the fifth hour,
The Major is put into the hospital cloth,
And placed into the reclining rectangle of supposed comfort.
The Lieutenant Colonel assists her,
Hand in hand.
They wait for the doctor.
Sweat trickles down the ailing woman’s face;
She gazes at the clock,
Yearning for the second hand to move more quickly.
Tick-tick,
She waits.
The Major needs an epidural;
It might be too late.
The doctor isn’t here.
Mid-Wife says, ‘It’s time.’
Panicked, the Lieutenant Colonel reaches for the epidural, the Mid-Wife assists.
Mid-Wife explains how the doctor needs the Major to wait, for he wants to be there for it.
She pushes anyways,
Once, twice, done.
Quiet, then swatted, she cries.
April 9th, 1995.
The Lieutenant Colonel made her a miniscule cap.
“Moon,”
He wrote on the fold.
The Spoon rushes in to see his kin, peering on his toes into the bassinet. “Baby Wolfe, Katie” it read.
Dawn breaks, the Major with the Moon in her arms.
The below freezing, dark and subsequent night, the family packs the Moon in a baby snowsuit and makes their way home.
Darkness creeps to midnight; the Lieutenant Colonel pulls a drawer from his dresser, pads the sides, and sets the Moon to sleep.