you, overdue

Walk to the library to pick up two books, take home six. Feel silly at the checkout, but you finish four of them, including Joan Didion. Wish you would have listened to everyone and read her three years ago. Set aside last two for a comforting re-read of Lolita.

Go to Haymarket and find the ugliest, biggest lemons for sale: 7 for $1, but you don’t get to pick them out. Watch skeptically as he selects them (you’re thinking of your cake), so skeptically that—or perhaps because you look so pregnant—you watch as he throws 2 extra in the bag. 9 for $1! Walk around the rest of the market feeling like the luckiest.

Use all the lemons to bake lemon cake. Make tomato sauce. Think about how those two culinary feats—cake from scratch, sauce—are referenced as the most homemaking tasks of all recipes. It’s because of the time; the crazy extra effort that might not even register on your tongue. But you made them because they sounded good. And they are good. Forget to take your prenatal vitamins and just eat lemon cake for a day.

Sit in the breeze of your new air conditioner. This ugly enormous machine that juts in passerby’s faces outside of your window without their permission, that you don’t quite understand the environmental impact of but understand it’s frowned upon, is the first purchase that makes you feel truly adult. It feels guilty indulgent, like taking a rose bath in the middle of the desert with water squirted from carried bottles.

Go out for Italian. Hunting for spicy: order the homemade fusilli with Fra Diavolo sauce. Eat all the fried peppers in the calamari. Talk cheerfully of how this is your last date free-of-other-human-responsibilities, avoiding the weighty (43 lbs; 8 days) fact that you both wish the baby had come yesterday. Be grateful the physical ripeness of being overdue makes this transition, freedom to responsibility, easy and obvious.