I have been on the road for a week. The miles already stretch out behind me from Sudbury, Ontario where we started to where I sit today, poised to drive to Cincinnati from Southern Indiana.

Lately, I have been touring with a GPS. It’s such a helpful tool, but I admit that I miss the tactile nature of maps and the hours I would spend studying them, understanding the terrain, tracing the roads like the Earth’s veins, all leading to the large cities, the people, the heart.

I had my own hotel room last night after having spent several days staying with friends. It was a treat to take a long, silent bath and walk around naked. I reveled in the opportunity to assess my body and how it is changing. I’m sure I’ve grown another inch of belly this week, like a horizontal growth spurt, and I stood in the full-length mirror admiring my pregnant image as though I were a classic statue of fertility.

And then I noticed the veins.

Veins have always grossed me out, to be honest. That’s the part of my personality that could never have become a surgeon or a doctor, for that matter. I realize they’re natural and normal, but their evidence in people’s bodies, especially the ill or aged, has always caused me to avert my eyes. Too much truth, perhaps. The transparency of our fragility. We are just a series of tubes and twisted channels that transport blood and fluids around these cumbersome bodies, vulnerable and delicate.

But last night, I was fascinated. Small baby blue veins now appear just below my skin’s surface, particularly on my sides and curving around my belly, all leading to the center of it all—my belly button, my Little Spark in there. My breasts, too, sport these same veins that crisscross and show alternate routes and main thoroughfares straight to the nipples. Straight to the source of nutrition come January.

It’s the road map I’ve been missing.

How have I never noticed these before?

I lost track of time studying my body’s map, unable to avert my eyes in the bright lights of the hotel room’s bathroom. We are, indeed, so fragile and vulnerable, delicate and intricate, but we are also so intensely powerful. To think that my body has now transformed itself into a vehicle for Little Spark and here it is mapping the journey for my eyes to read!

I imagined life energy travelling those veins not unlike our journey now in my Grandma’s old Buick LeSabre. Like a brand new sky’s wink at us from outside of the windshield, the car we’re driving is also baby blue.

Baby. Blue.

Fitting.