Nonfiction

But its impossible to go very far without seeing a sudden dark opening, the sloping, rotting framing of an abandoned mine entrance, or the colorful, dangerous scree sloping downhill: the remnant tailings from the ore processing that once happened here, spilling from a now filled-in shaft that one hundred years ago would have been busy with miners like so many ants at an anthill.

Suddenly, the baby’s head was in my hands and I saw the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck—the neck, oh my, with all those critical bits of anatomy. I held that big slippery baby head in my left hand and slid a couple of fingers under the purple rope and lifted it loose and then the infant slipped out of the mother, into my arms. Finally, the baby could breathe. I could breathe.