Hey people, it's John B.Win. Hope you're well, as we say, amidst all of it.

So much happening, so much of it relevant to things we've explored on our show.

I'm coming in here in this post-season 5 hiatus to introduce a summer mini-season of re-broadcasts.

You could call it a few of my favorite things from the back catalog.

Starting with some episodes from the early pre-seeing white era of scene on radio.

Look, I can see the download numbers. I know a lot of y'all have never gone back and listen to what we now call season 1.

There are something like 30 episodes there, and there is some good stuff.

I'm very happy to put this piece back in the feed so it can reach more ears.

Stacia Brown is a writer and audio producer. She now lives here in Durham, North Carolina, but when I met her, she lived in Baltimore.

Stacia and I were both part of a national local or storytelling project in 2015.

And the following year, I twisted her arm to come to an advanced audio workshop that I've led for years here at CDS.

During that week-long course, Stacia made this extraordinary audio essay.

And I asked her to work up a version for scene on radio.

I don't say this kind of thing lightly. I listened again recently, and I thought,

if there's a better piece of writing out there anywhere in audio essay form than this one, I haven't heard it.

Stacia's piece refers to events that were fresh in 2016, a pair of very newsworthy deaths of Black men in Minnesota.

But the larger experiences she's reflecting on are shamefully, just as relevant today.

It depends on the mother, but some begin to lose themselves in the fleshy post-birth folds around their waist,

in the feeling of excess blood decreasing and slowly recalibrating its flow, and adjusting to the less-taxing burden of one body again instead of the heft of two.

It depends on the mother, but for some, childbirth is beset with instability, the worry attendant to a partner's precarious presence.

Now you see him texting in the delivery room. Now you don't, at three in the morning, decide to changing table, or hunched over the diaper pale.

He is at once flesh and apparition, at once as essential to the braided DNA inside the baby, and as intangible as desert air.

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