Friday, April 18, 2008

How to Plant a Placenta

Disgusting isn’t it. Not quite an organ but it sure looks like a liver. The placenta. A nutritional life source we all feed on when we are in the womb. Most women have no desire to look at it after the baby pops out but there are those who attach special meaning to it. Ellen is just one of those people. She’s the second person I know that after giving birth at home via a midwife, wants to bury the placenta in the backyard under a tree or bush to nourish her yard as it nourished her child for 9 months. I believe in the importance of rituals so I was down with burying her placenta. Tim would have nothing to do with it. So after loading up the U-Haul, Ellen, Oscar and I took the frozen, zip-lock-bagged placenta out into the yard for the internment ceremony. I found a shovel in the basement and dug a deep hole next to her boxwoods. It’s not every day I bury placentas so I needed to get pictures of it as you can see. After that, Ellen took out the frozen, bloody blob and plopped it into the hole. I tamped the dirt well so as not to have the cats or a raccoon dig it up. Can you imagine cats running around with that thing in their mouths?? YUCK!! Thank God she had it well labeled for if it got mixed in with all the venison she gave me, that would have been uber-gross!