November 24, 2006 ~ Warning: Contents Are Not What They Seem
Friday.
You'd think I'd recognize one of my own organs.
As I poked through the freezer before Thanksgiving, looking for the cranberries, however, I found myself thinking, "But wait. What's that bright red thing?"
Finally I noticed the pale umbilical cord. Ah. My placenta.
What? You don't have human organs in your freezer? (Well. Okay. Maybe you do...)
See, we knew that we wanted to plant a Birth Tree for Grove, and a Birth Tree is traditionally planted over the placenta. Grove was born in the winter, though--not ideal tree-planting weather. So we froze the placenta until we could plant Grove's birth tree.
(Yes. I realize that we moved on through spring and summer and fall and are now in winter again. And there is still a placenta in our freezer, rather than under a sapling. The Birth Tree planting was delayed by lack of a tree and lack of a place to plant a tree and lack of a shovel and lack of appropriate motivation on the part of two very disorganized new parents. We'll just have to find a two-year-old tree this spring. And a place to put it. And a shovel.)
(And do you see how I tactfully refrained from mentioning the presence of my discarded body parts in our freezer until after hosting Thanksgiving dinner? Why, you're welcome, Stephen!)
But see. That's not the worst of it. There's also a dead rat. In our freezer. He was our pet. We loved him very much. He died shortly after the dogs arrived (of unrelated causes, I might add, for clarity's sake... though I'm sure that if given the opportunity they would have gladly eaten him), and we wanted to give him a proper burial. But, see, that whole lack-of-a-shovel problem...
True. Any sane couple would have just gone out and bought the damn shovel already, but sanity is not a plentiful commodity around here; it wasn't even before Grove arrived.
Perhaps we should put a sign on the freezer door: "Beware. Contains Placenta. And Dead Rat. Be Sure of Contents Before Cooking." Morgan often jokes that we can't bury the placenta, for if we do he can no longer tease dinner guests about potential menu items made from his wife's organs. "Would anyone like some placenta pâté?"
Perhaps sanity is not the only commodity we're lacking around here...
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