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an “unforeseen occurrence”: the placenta separating from the uterine wall before the baby has arrived or such signs of fetal distress as a falling heartbeat.
    In all of the years that my mother practiced, the records would reveal, just about four percent of the time she took her laboring women and went to the hospital.
    There’s no question in my mind that my mother and the medical community disliked each other. But she would never have let their conflicts jeopardize the health of one of her patients. That’s a fact.
    I could begin my mother’s story with Charlotte Fugett Bedford’s death, but that would mean I’d chosen to open her life with what was for her the beginning of the end. It would suggest that all that mattered in her life was the crucible that made my family a part of one tragic little footnote to history.
    So I won’t.
    Besides, I view this as my story, too, and why I believe babies became my calling as well.
    And I am convinced that our stories began in the early spring of 1980, a full eighteen months before my mother would watch her life unravel in a crowded courtroom in northern Vermont, and at least a full month before the Bedfords would even arrive in our state.
    Here’s what I recall: I recall that the mud was a nightmare that year, but the sugaring was amazing. That’s often the case. If the mud is bad, the maple will be good, because mud and maple are meteorological cousins of a sort. The kind of weather that turns dirt roads in Vermont into quicksand in March—a frigid, snowy winter, followed by a spring with warm days and cold, cold nights—also inspires maple trees to produce sap that is sweet and plentiful and runs like the rivers swollen by melted snow and ice.
    My mother’s and father’s families no longer sugared, and so my memories of that March revolve more around mud than maple syrup: For me, that month was largely an endless stream of brown muck. It covered my boots to my shins in the time it would take to trudge fifty yards from the edge of our once-dirt driveway to the small cubbyhole of a room between the side door and the kitchen, which earned its name as a mudroom in those days: The floors and walls would be caked with the stuff. When the mud was wet, it was the dark, rich color of tobacco; when it dried, the color grew light and resembled the powder we used then to make chocolate milk.
    But wet or dry, the mud was everywhere for two weeks in the March of 1980. The dirt roads became sponges into which automobiles were constantly sinking and becoming stuck, sometimes sinking so deep that the drivers would be unable to open their doors to escape and would have to climb through the car windows to get out. Yards became bogs that slowed running dogs to a walk. Virtually every family in our town had laid down at least a few long planks or wide pieces of plywood to span the puddles of mud on their lawns or to try and link the spot of driveway on which they parked their cars with their front porches.
    My mother parked her station wagon just off the paved road at the end of our driveway, as she did often in the winter and early spring, to ensure that she could get to her patients in a timely fashion. Nevertheless, there were still those occasional births when even my determined mother was unable to get there in time. The section of our old house she used as her office had one whole wall filled with photos of the newborn babies she’d delivered with their parents, and one of those snapshots features a baby crowning while the mother is attended by her sister. The sister is pressing a telephone against her ear with her shoulder while she prepares to catch the child. My mother is at the other end of that telephone, talking the sister through the delivery since a snowstorm had prevented either her or the town rescue squad from getting to the laboring woman before the baby decided it was time to arrive.
    That spring, even a city with nothing but paved streets and solid sidewalks like