Week 12 – Belly Poetry

True coincidences are few and far between, and so this coincidence really makes me giggle.  Mr. Wetzel and I are pregnant.  Of course, being pregnant is enough to keep us giggling for awhile, especially since it’s our first baby.  To top it off, however, we are 12 weeks pregnant.  And this is week 12 of my CSA blog series.  Holy freakin’ cow!

I’ve been excited to break the news to y’all ever since we found out at the beginning of August.  When I realized that we were on the same week progression as the blog series, I just about flipped a switch. How cool?! The way “pregnancy weeks” work, we weren’t even pregnant for the first two weeks, so there was no way we could have planned this if we tried (you start counting from the first day of your last period).

I’ve been thrilled that we’re growing the baby on fresh CSA summer fruit. Every week I pick up the regular share of food, and then buy extra apples, grapes, peaches or plums in the farm store at Terry’s Berries.  A pregnant appetite is a fickle one, so most of the time fresh fruit is the only thing I can bear to eat. Thank goodness we’re pregnant in the summer months when fruit is so fresh and easy to come by!

I’m also grateful that we’ve been eating organic, unprocessed foods from the farm since last autumn.  My body is full of stores of good nutrients and stores for the baby to use while growing in my belly.  We have the wonderful farm-fresh eggs, raised full of sunshine and a roaming love of the green farm grass.  I like to think that, when I eat the eggs sunny side up on my whole grain toast, a bit of the wild happy animal spirit gets passed through me and on to my baby. The beets and potatoes at the farm are showered with the misty and unpredictable Washington rain, and these vegetables hold onto the root of mysteriousness from their surroundings, only to dissolve into my bloodstream and whisper secrets onto the little person in my belly.

We’re passing through a time that will never come again. We always are. We always take something with us…totems that we consume, that become part of our flesh, our blood, our spirit, our soul. I don’t mean all this in a pantheistic way, but in a poetic way. It is true: an apple is at its best when it’s allowed to just be an apple. But the apple is part of something greater: a worldview, an ethos for living, a pattern that affects not just one farm or one family or one bite and taste.  I expect my apple to be local, so I support my local farm. I expect my apple to be grown without pesticides, so my baby is nourished without toxins streaming through my bloodstream. I know my farmer and I talk to the workers who grow my food, so I know they are treated fairly and humanely.

When you allow yourself to touch real people and real food, it opens up a part of you that simply doesn’t surface in a white-washed grocery store with its consumer mentality.  We are beings with imaginations and souls.  We give birth to babies and dreams.  We touch each other through our meals and our imaginations.  I am a being of flesh and wind, and I fuel my body with foods from the earth. I fuel my soul with waters that run deep. I fuel my hope with dreams out of time.

If you had the guts to let yourself just sit and be…what kind of poem would be written about you?

By ekwetzel
2010-09-24

WEEK 12
(Clockwise, from the eggs)
Eggs (again, the farm has young hens, and they are laying smaller eggs this week, so we received 18 eggs instead of the normal dozen)
Lettuce
6 Corn on the Cob
2 Cucumbers
1 Head of Garlic
Flat Parsley
Curley Parsley
Fennell
Summer Squash
2 Onions
6 Potatoes
(In the middle)
4 Tomatoes
6 Apples
Green Beans