The Other Side of the World

Their house was the sort that matches my much-loved idea of home - well worn, oddly shaped, bare boards, random instruments littering the corners, barefoot children and strange cats and cloth diapers strewn about, a deep ancient bath and a kitchen crammed with glass jars that holds everything else together in a warm and thoughtful embrace.
Walking calmy in out of the foggy mid-night, my midwife and I were audience to a nativity of three (give or take two sleepy girls tumbling out of bedsheets to tentatively brush their hands over their newest sister) - deep in the awed glow of birth as it was surely, truly, deep-in-my-heart-seated meant to be.
And from there we wrapped up warmly, embraced, laughed deeply and slipped into the joyful simplicity of a family so clearly at home in every aspect of those words.

Home is friends in the kitchen cooking soup
children poking at the placenta in awe
Papa catching a baby and then lighting a fire
good conversation and dried apricots and genuine warmth that can never exist anywhere else
a placenta in the kitchen bucket
curling up in your own big bed while a rapt midwifery student gently leans in from the corner to give you one last check

oh and rapture?

Rapture is a homebirth