My dear baby,

You’ll be born when the magnolias are blooming. Softest petals of milk white, grand in size, budding and opening in all their splendor amid waxy leaves. There’s a small magnolia tree in the yard behind our house which caught my attention the other day. I notice growing things. I never realized how many growing things I notice and name until your father noticed and named this trait in me.

My first apartment was so small that if I spread out my arms - fingertips touching one wall of the living room - and then took two shuffling steps in the opposite direction, I could touch the other wall. The bathroom was a shoebox so tiny the sink couldn’t fit and was positioned right outside the bathroom door in the bedroom. Cramped, finicky, and with sketchy neighbors, it was the first place which was fully and truly all my own. I absolutely loved it.

Feeling a baby move inside me is one of the most unique parts of being pregnant. It's unlike anything I could have imagined, and yet is perfectly natural, too. It's almost a kind of secret; how often I feel the tiny yet strengthening movements throughout the day. I can be sitting and taking minutes during a meeting, or having a conversation with someone, or walking down a hall, and no one knows of the barrage of kicks, jabs, and turns happening within. They continue to surprise me. Hello, I think, so active!

Just past the shoreline
there are jellyfish and stingrays, their poison at the ready
there are sharks, certainly

The woman on screen had a beautifully angular face and hair cropped so short it was nearly buzzed. She held her five-month-old baby and spoke rapidly to the camera as she showed her surroundings; the basement of an apartment building in the city of Kyiv crammed with people and holding a meager supply of food for an unknown length of sheltering.

The sea turtles were the first to fully take in the scene. All the smaller fish went darting away as quickly as possible - they were used to fleeing, after all, that being the natural order of things. It was when the sharks also sped away, not towards, as they are wont to do in their predatory way, but from, that the rest of the ocean understood there was truly a problem.

The words "bomb threat" carried from the television speaker into the bedroom, where I was putting on my makeup. The newscaster's voice shared how it wasn't the first threat at that particular college, detailing the usual following events of evacuation and investigation. I turned on my blowdryer, drowning out the news, yet my thoughts lingered along the somber narrative.

A sonnet for my baby, quietly growing more each day.

I didn’t know I was good soil until
A seed took root and let us both become
A garden, verdant, and what joy to till
Of all sweet hope, this bloom will be the sum

Every year, I enjoy looking back on music which stood out to me. Mostly it is new music from that year, though sometimes a song from the past will make it onto my list of ones I play on repeat. Always, there is so much more music to discover, so much I didn't get to or didn't hear about. Music, like most art, is a wonder; there is such variety in what is produced, what resonates with whom, and what continues to last.