Getting pregnant was like moving into a tent erected at the confluence of Time and Eternity. On a nearby post I found a life buoy attached to a length of rope, and a cellar of salt. Inside the tent a flashlight hung above a text knee deep in pensive, bossy, sometimes hysterical interlineal and marginal glosses. No brook murmuring? Whitewater bubble-gaffe! Leap!! Look!!!

The plain text was task-oriented in a roundabout way, providing detailed instructions for how NOT to build an elaborate sequence of bridges, each one bound to produce, according to chapters one through twenty-three, disastrous results. Graphic novels disguised as illuminated letters twisted the tent-dwelling decipherer into painful self-recognition. The flashlight followed the phases of the moon.

Meanwhile one strand of marginalia, written in anxious back-slant, pleaded for some kind of adjustable form for managing the confluence, especially during flood season. I like what we came up with. 'We' is a little big word. In fact the tent turns out to be one of those Borgesian core-tech structures allowing for astonishing internal expansion. There's not much we didn't get in there and not much in there that didn't get us.

So I suppose that's it. This tent. This confluence. These children who found me here, turned text into life and made life home.