I was 8 months pregnant with my second child.  This one a boy, confirmed by both the ultrasound showing “a stem on the apple” and my own awareness of how this pregnancy felt different from my first, which bore me a girl.  We were living in a grimy, bars –on–the window apartment in Oakland which I was desperate to convert into a beautiful, catalog image of a clean, safe, practical place to raise my happy family.  My mother had come down from her home on the coast to help watch my 2 year old daughter while my husband and some friends cleared the bedrooms to paint another coat of “landlord white” across the stratified walls.  We had moved all the bedroom furniture to the small living room and were prepared to sleep on a mattress on the floor while the paint fumes dissipated in the bedrooms behind closed doors and open windows.  My husband and I had plans that night, to attend a party, a birthday celebration I think, for some friends that did not have kids; a reminder of the good old days I had left behind to suffer, once again the discomfort of pregnancy and the endless nights of nursing a small infant.  Before we left for the evening, amid the dressers and mattress strewn across the living room floor, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown, crying to my mom, complaining I was tired, wondering if anything would be ready, the way I wanted it, before this child came.  We went to the party and came home early, curled up on our foam mattress on the living room floor, safe from the deforming fumes of the newly painted bedrooms, and went to sleep.

Waking in the morning, ready to face a new day with a really positive attitude, I opened the refrigerator to find the cavity dark, the milk warm and the motor of our fridge burned out.  Maybe it was a surge of nesting hormones, maybe it was self-pity and an overwhelming feeling that I was not ready for this new child to arrive, I started to cry and swear, and oh not so quietly, began to throw the contents of the fridge on the kitchen floor. A flurry of spoiled dairy products, wilted veggies and 2 year old jars of jalapenos hit the floor as I rampaged through the fridge.  I opened the freezer door ready to continue my angry purge and was immediately faced with the reality that my problems concerning a lack of refrigeration were larger than I ever anticipated.  

When my daughter was born, 2 years prior, we had decided we would like to keep her placenta to someday bury at the base of a tree in a spiritual affirmation to her life and our love for her.  It would have to be buried in a place where we could always go back and show her, a place that was special, not in the backyard of our 4 plex on Park Blvd. So we stuck it in the freezer until we could do right by the placenta.  We were never supposed to take the placenta from the hospital in the first place, our doula was able to convince the nurse to pack it up in a discreet plastic container which we had to sort of sneak out of the hospital.  Now, the half defrosted mass of bloody tissue was sitting in a red bio-hazard bag inside what looked like a 3 gallon container of sherbet ice cream fetidly melting by the minute.  What the hell could I do?  Ask my sweet Austrian neighbor to “please keep my placenta in your freezer till we get a new one?”  

I was able to distract myself for most of the day, moving furniture back to the bedrooms, and making distraught calls to the landlord about replacing the fridge, but the slowly decaying, veiny, sac sitting in the warm freezer was calling to me like the tell-tale placenta.  We had to find a suitable home for the placenta, TODAY.  After some discussion, and inventory of tools, my sweetie and I decided we would bury the putrid glob, so special and important to us, near the site where we got married, in a local regional park.   Thank goodness Grandma was there, able to watch our daughter, while her father and I, equipped with a shovel, gloves, bio hazard bag full of rotting placenta and a book of life affirming poems, drove up to the hills to bury her life giving spume among the beautiful willows and bay trees of Tilden Park.

It was May in the Bay Area, the evening was pleasant, the light still golden around 5p when we pulled into the parking area at the park picnic site.  There were no other cars when we arrived so we felt no need to hide our shovel and bloody bag which, if anyone had been around, may have needed some explaining.  I’m not sure if it’s illegal to bury temporary organs in public regional parks, but it’s probably frowned upon at least and an actual public health threat at worst.  Anywho, we unloaded our supplies headed over a small hill, past the public bathroom  and down the other side to a tree covered creek area not visible from the parking lot.  The air smelled of bay leaves and the cool trickling of the creek was relaxing and inviting, a perfect spot to bury our blessed placenta and leave traces of our DNA forever rooted in this pristine riparian drainage basin.  At the base of a healthy looking Coast Live Oak tree, right on the edge of the creek, we broke ground, dug about 2 feet deep, (maybe less, we are not overachievers) opened the bag, gave it a few shakes and waited as the mucus mass slowly slid through the opening and plopped into the hole. We quickly covered the hole with dirt, read a poem, (I honestly can’t remember what it was, but something that was important at the time) kissed each other and holding hands headed back up the hill.  

Remember, I was 8 months pregnant, we were emerging from a heavily wooded creek bed in a fairly remote part of a big regional park, carrying a shovel and a now empty, bloody, red bio-hazard bag.  As we crested the hill, we noticed there was now another car in the parking lot and in fact, there sat a whole family eating a 20 piece KFC meal at the picnic table right by our car.  Suddenly, we heard the flush of a toilet and to our surprise a young girl came skipping out of bathroom just as we were walking past.  She took one look at us, the shovel and bloody plastic bag and broke out in what appeared to be a panicked sprint towards her family.  We paused for a moment, watching her run towards her family who by now were looking her direction and were alerted to the fact that they were not alone.  I looked at my sweetie, laughed nervously and instructed him to run.  So we did.  We hustled as quick as we could with our seemingly murderous gear, our creepy book of poems and my protruding belly.  Heads down we didn’t pause to look at anything but the path ahead to the car.  My heart was pounding waiting to hear the woop woop sound of the park police pulling into the parking lot.  The car was locked, the electronic key didn’t work anymore so we couldn’t unlock the doors remotely. Time slowed down as we fumbled to unlock the back door with the key and throw the shovel in the back.  We hopped in the front and pulled out of the parking lot.  Before we turned out of the lot onto the road, I looked back at the family.  They were all standing up at the table watching our car pull out, the large father taking steps toward the car, waving his arms as we pulled away.  The whole ride home I nervously waited for sirens and a cop on a loud speaker telling us to pull over.  It didn’t happen, we made it safely home.

We walked in the front door, adrenaline still pumping, laughing nervously.  My mom was on the couch watching TV with the volume down,  shushing us because she had finally put my daughter to sleep.  We plopped down on the couch and whispering to my mom, reported what we had just experienced.  She listened with her hand on her mouth laughing and shaking her head at how weird we were and wondering why the hell we had kept that nasty afterbirth in the first place.

We were enjoying the quiet moments after the storytelling and a rare silence of the street outside when suddenly a whir and click and the sound of a motor revving - the broken refrigerator fan inexplicably kicked on, somehow knowing that while it successfully expunged one heam, there was another on the way that would need a sub-zero home until it was ready to be buried and reborn.