I have researched and explored the lives and experiences of English women and men who faced fertility problems in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. I have become so immersed in their world that a friend who is a modern day OB/GYN teases me that I talk about my historical subjects as though they were patients.
I’ve always loved the sound of the words Fertile Delta. The liquidic sound of the vowels coupled with the l, the hard D of delta, Greek for change, speaks to the power of a seasonal, shape-shifting body. Fertile Crescent makes another lovely pair. Crescent, so soothing, this half-moon, this womanly way to describe the cradle of civilization. Fertile, crescent, cradle, delta. The opposite of these words: barren.
