I was almost finished defrosting the refrigerator when I stuck my nose in the freezer and a rotting smell hit me.
I moved the ice cube trays out of the way and saw two large plastic bags in the back. I pulled one out and found a huge chunk of snow saved from last year at the ski basin. That was funny—it had just snowed six inches yesterday, no need to keep that memory. I tossed the bag into the sink.
But the other bag was still stuck. That smell… The plastic ripped away in my hands leaving a huge chunk of blood melded to the freezer floor. Nothing else would have that much blood. And all of it thawing—the black ice turning rich red.
I was looking at a frozen placenta.
It was at that moment of realization that my youngest, Asher, let me know the truck with our new fridge had arrived. My cell phone rang. I washed my hands and talked to the delivery guy who was walking down the driveway. He wasn’t sure his truck would make it. I told him I’d pull him out with my four-wheel drive if he got stuck.
We met out front and he confirmed the deeply packed snow on the walk wouldn’t be a problem. He and his buddy came in to check their navigation and I quickly closed the freezer door.
To my horror, the extra guy suddenly pulled the fridge completely away from the wall to check behind it. Black filth on the floor, years of it. While the new fridge was getting prepared outside, Asher—bless his heart—started cleaning the floor behind the fridge and I went back to my blood bath, frantically trying to loosen the frozen mass before they came back to take it away. How would I explain this stuck, frozen body part to two appliance guys, one with a Korn T-shirt? Would they even know what a placenta was?
Then I realized exactly whose placenta was defrosting: Asher’s. Must be. We buried Talaya’s at the foot of Talaya Hill, Colin’s in the back yard of the house he was born in, under the apricot tree. This must be Asher’s from La Cienega. We hadn’t done anything with it during the five years we lived there, or the five years we had it here; just moved it from one freezer to the next, like an old piece of wedding cake.
I looked down at Asher scrubbing away in the corner. Ten years, was all I could think. Such a long time. Once, Asher and this frozen meat were one and the same inside me.
I grabbed a kitchen knife and began hacking at the ice.
“What are you doing?” Asher’s porcelain face peeked around the corner. Had he felt something? Was there still a visceral connection between him and what was born with him? I held the knife out of sight.
“Go help those guys get around the couch, OK?”
I waited for him to disappear into the other room, then sawed away at the frozen mound. Finally it was free. I dropped the ball of blood in the trash, wiped out the rest as best I could, mopped up the floor with more paper towels, washed my hands, and tied up the garbage bag. I placed it in another bag, dark green. Now, where to put it? My hands were shaking, I started to laugh at the absurdity when I heard voices in the living room.
I rushed out the back door. In the furthest part of the trash area, I slipped the bag into a garbage bucket and covered it with a plastic lid. I secured the waste with half a cement block. I washed my hands once more in the kitchen sink, shades of Lady Macbeth.
When the new fridge was in place, and the old one tipped back on the dolly, I watched as brown water dripped out the bottom, then trailed across the linoleum as they took it away.
Of course they got stuck in the driveway, even though I told them to start from a flat place and go very slowly: low and slow. But they sped up just as they hit the patch of ice on the incline. I was watching from the window thinking I would have to suggest a tow, when a half-ton honked and stopped—a friend, apparently, with a chain to rescue them.
I ran off to a meeting in town and wasn’t back home until night. The first thing I saw when I walked into the kitchen was not the sparkling new white fridge with the freezer more efficiently located on the bottom, but a small, dark green bag directly in front of me near the dining room’s sliding glass door. There it sat, sucking in the energy of the room like a black hole.
As in most families, no one really listens to the mom, so although I didn’t get an answer as to how the bag came back into the house, I took it outside a second time, and this time put a full cement block on top of the bucket to make sure it would be harder to move. Then I told my husband to take it to the dump on his next run.
Asher had already organized all our food in the new fridge, excited by an actual butter door and vegetable drawers. He read the appliance booklet the moving guys had left behind, and showed me the new temperature gauge.
But it was—no kidding—the beginning of spring when I encountered the bag again. It was still in the plastic bucket but had moved to the tool shed. I confronted my husband who said he couldn’t take it to the dump and just throw it out.
What happened to us? In our twenties, when our first child was born, we knew the value of a placenta; we even cooked and ate some of it, having learned how rich in nutrients it was. That was us then: goat’s milk and cloth diapers, water births and no TV.
Things changed by the third kid, by the time Asher was born. Life got more hectic, money got scarce, TV got better. And we forgot to have any kind of ceremony over the last placenta.
So we dug a hole out back under a giant piñon, and dumped the contents of the bucket into it, held our breaths—and our noses—as the plastic bag slid down into the earth. We settled a large piece of flagstone over it, hoping it would be too deep for the coyotes to smell it.
I was about to suggest we say a few words, like we were burying a pet, but that didn’t seem right. We’d ended a huge cycle. We were giving the earth back to the earth, moving out of the guiding part of the roller coaster part of the parenting ride, and into the hold-on-tight part.
New fridges and old blood.
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Photo from http://www.superhealthykids.com