Sundae’s Site

The Handyman

I found Carolyn See’s book about writing, Making a Literary Life, while browsing in a bookstore. I found it immensely inspiring, not to mention funny and moving. If you’re at all inclined to the literary life, I highly recommend it. In an attempt to put off actually writing anything myself, I decided I had to find out more about Carolyn See and read some of her fiction, in order to make sure that she was someone who’s advice was worth taking.

So I was a little worried about reading See’s fiction (I didn’t want to find out that another of my idols had feet of clay), but I found The Handyman in the library and started with it.
That book made me so happy, almost as happy as the last special episode of the BBC comedy “The Office.” Not that “The Office” and The Handyman have anything in common – they don’t even make me happy for the same reasons, but I felt buoyed up and cheerful for days after seeing “The Office” special, and I felt the same sense of hope and contentment after finishing The Handyman.

The morning after I’d stayed up late to finish it, I told my children the entire story, and they were happy, too. Then I called my mom and my sister, and told them to ahold of a copy ASAP. You need this happiness, I told them. Then I passed it on to my friend, Amelia, who also read it. She was dubious at first – it has a strange opening – but she was all smiles when she handed it back to me. “It brought me peace,” she said. “He was so kind.”

The “he” refers to Bob, the narrator, protagonist and handyman, but we can’t talk about him just yet.

The book starts off with a grant application (dated August 15, 2027) from Peter Laue to the Guggenheim Foundation, asking for money to further his work researching the life and early paintings of an artist, Robert Hampton, whose career began one summer in 1996. Peter Laue has spoken to all the owners of Hampton’s earliest artworks, and has visited Hampton and his family at their artist compound in Mexico, and he wants the Guggenheim Foundation to pay for him to go back.

This letter is what every good grant-application letter should be: full of its own sense of importance and entitlement. (In one of my all-time favorite books, Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, the protagonist says that he has written an academic paper that does what all academic papers should do: “shed pseudo-light on a non-problem.” I love that line. Basically that’s what Peter Laue wants to do, too.) His letter is full of pompous and meaningless artspeak. You get the feeling that he’s pretty pathetic, especially when he reports how very kind Hampton was to him. Basically, by the time you finish this introduction, you are looking as dubious as Amelia did. Hang in there. It all makes sense in the end.

The novel really begins when Bob starts telling us about his fateful summer. He’s a disillusioned artist wanna-be, who’s just given up on grad school in Paris, and come back home to L.A. to get a useful art-related master’s, maybe in advertising, or teaching. He has a summer of time to kill before school starts, and he decides to make a little money as a handyman. That summer changes his life, and the lives of everyone he meets. Bob doesn’t just fix broken washers and dryers; he also fixes (kinda like James Taylor) broken hearts – men’s, women’s, and children’s. AND he discovers his art. Bob will make you happy, too, and you’ll get the feeling that even poor Peter Laue is going to be okay.

In my most recent issue of Ex Libris, I promised to post this essay I wrote for the Spring 2003 issue of Brain, Child magazine. The funny thing is that I have another placenta in my freezer right now. I managed to get Caroline’s in the ground when she was two months old; Mariah Daisy is already 14 months, and hers is still awaiting for me to figure out what I want to plant and where.

So, here’s my story, and if I get ambitious in the next few days, I may upload some pictures of the bowl and/or the rose bush, but not, I promise, the placenta in my freezer.

Planting My Placenta: Pomp, Circumstance and the Erie Canal Song

It was a sunny autumn day when I decided to bury my placenta. Baby Caroline was two months old and her big brother Emmet had stopped asking when she was going to leave. The kids and I ventured out to our local greenhouse and chose a native wild rose, one we would call Caroline’s Rose. The nursery owner was happy to hear about our plans, and assured me that my placenta would provide plenty of nutrients for the rose bush; she also advised me to let it thaw first, so that the cold wouldn’t freeze the roots. Another customer told me she was glad “someone’s doing something useful with her placenta.”

I was enjoying the novelty of the experience and feeling rather “womanlier-than-thou,” as if this ceremony would set me above my modern peers. I liked the idea of getting in touch with my primitive roots. Like childbirth and breastfeeding, placenta burial was something women had been doing since the dawn of time, and I wanted to be yet another woman along that continuum, another woman giving nourishment back to the earth that had nourished her, another woman acknowledging the life-giving force she carried within her. Or something like that. I didn’t have a real plan in mind, but I hoped this would be a meaningful moment for me and all of womankind.

I had been looking forward to this day since way back in the spring when the fate of my placenta was first brought to mind. While looking over the list of supplies I would need for my impending homebirth, I’d noticed one item that stood out as in need of special attention: “a large, round bowl for the placenta.” Hmm, I’d thought, what kind of bowl is appropriate? Is Tupperware too tacky? Is my stainless steel mixing bowl big enough/too big for a placenta? Could this be a good excuse to get a new bowl?

It was. I visited my friend Christina in her pottery shop. “Can you make me a bowl?” I asked her. “For my placenta,” I whispered.

“You need a ceremonial bowl!” she exclaimed, embracing me and attracting the attention of all her shop’s customers. To our mutual delight, Christina was on the job. “Oh, it’ll be beautiful! I know just what glazes I’ll use….” she sighed dreamily. Although her enthusiasm was infectious (and appreciated), I was too practical-minded to let Christina’s whimsy take over, and so I confessed, “There’s only one thing I’m not sure about.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t really know how big it needs to be. I’ve never actually seen a placenta.”
“Oh I have,” she said, “I saw Lisa’s.”
“You did?” (It’s one thing to see your own placenta, but to see another woman’s? Wow.)
“Sure did.” She smiled rather smugly.
“Really! Wow. Where did you see it? How did she get it home?”
“She froze it in a plastic bag and brought it home in a cooler.”
“What did she do with it?” I asked with increasing interest.
“We buried it under that big live oak in her yard. We had a ceremony and gave it back to the earth. It was beautiful.”
Hmm, I thought. Cool.

I had been wondering what I was going to do with my placenta. I had bragged to some people that maybe I would eat it. I’m kidding. I mean, I did say it, but just to watch my husband turn pale and to enjoy the shock value it held for the few people who weren’t already shocked by the concept of homebirth. I never really considered eating it and figured I was the only person depraved enough to joke about it, but my mother reports that a neighbor of a friend of hers actually did eat one (her own, I hope) and had a recipe she was willing to share with me. I declined.

Part of the problem with my placenta’s fate was that my homebirth was going to be in someone else’s home. Our home on a barrier island – a ferry ride and two hundred miles from the nearest hospital – so we borrowed a home in a lovely and convenient neighborhood within ten minutes of my midwives, medical back-up, and a really great Greek restaurant. I had somehow assumed that I would leave my placenta behind when we headed back home, but where? I couldn’t exactly flush it down the toilet and it probably shouldn’t go in the trash. I wondered what the hospital had done with my first placenta. (They had whisked it away so fast I had never even seen it.) I had thought about burying it at the borrowed house, but I really didn’t think I’d want to be out digging in the yard just after childbirth, and I knew that my husband, Rob (sweet man that he is), wouldn’t do it for me (not a chance in hell), and I just didn’t think I could ask it of our friends who own the borrowed house. Clearly, if any placentas were going to get buried, it was going to be up to me.

“I’m going to freeze my placenta,” I told everyone, “and I’m going to bring it home to bury it, and if this baby’s a girl I’m going to plant a rose bush over it.” I had a plan and I was ready.

Christina presented me with an inspired piece of pottery – the placenta bowl was gorgeous. It was glazed indigo blue on the outside, with swirls of magenta and cobalt on the inside, and at eight inches deep and twelve in diameter, it felt like just the right size; it felt perfect in my hands. But the piece de resistance was the wide lip around the edge with raised decorations that, to an unsuspecting eye, might look like ram’s heads – little Aries, perhaps – but to anyone who knew the bowl’s purpose, they were unmistakably uteri and fallopian tubes. Christina told me that she had meditated on a good birth for me as she made it, and that the bowl possessed strong energy to support my birth experience. This is the kind of remark that usually makes me laugh, but I was so enraptured with the bowl that I thanked her sincerely and left her shop clutching the beautiful pottery across my fecund belly.

Our friends had thoughtfully prepared the borrowed home for our arrival. Although my main requirements were air-conditioning and a washing machine, my friend Kathleen assured me that the house also had good vibes. She had smudged the house with sage for me, and placed items in the master bedroom for optimum feng shui. (I’m happy to say that I responded graciously and didn’t roll my eyes when she told me this.) We placed the placenta bowl on the dresser where it was flanked by my naked-pregnant-woman candles, which, as it turned out, we only burned for about three minutes because I was so damn hot during labor and wanted the fan to blow directly on me, which made the candles flicker unnervingly.

I can’t say that Christina’s meditations and Kathleen’s smudgings helped, but they sure didn’t hurt. Everything went smoothly and Caroline was born. After we were cleaned up and Caroline was getting the hang of nursing, our midwife took us on a guided tour of my placenta. It was fascinating even to my squeamish husband – and I couldn’t help admiring how nicely it fit in the bowl. She showed us the umbilical cord and the amniotic sac, and we saw how it all worked with the wiggly, liver-like placenta, and got to watch her flip it right-side out. We were, I think, duly impressed.

Somehow my placenta got whisked away (funny, I was really paying more attention to Caroline), slipped into a Ziploc bag, wrapped in paper grocery sacks and frozen. The bowl, mission accomplished, was washed and placed back on the dresser. My placenta made it home in our cooler and, wrapped in a brown paper bag in the back of the freezer, all but forgotten. We remembered it only when my carnivorous husband, foraging for something to throw on the grill, would ask, Whats in here?, and then jump when he realized what he held. The first time this happened, it was a true surprise, but since he thought it was so funny, he reenacted the scene way more than was necessary. It was something I wouldn’t have to put up with after I got the thing buried.

On the way home from the plant nursery, I was high on motherhood. I lectured Emmet about how my placenta had taken care of Caroline when she was in my tummy and now it would help take care of the rose bush, and that it would be Caroline’s special flower and he could help water it until she was big enough to help, and it would be fun, fun, fun!

I wasn’t so thrilled with the idea by the time I’d dug the hole. By that point I was tired, hot, hungry, and over it. But I was determined that this was the day, even as I sat next to the hole to nurse Caroline and swat mosquitoes, while Emmet kept digging (and flipping dirt all over us.) Rob wasn’t any help; the fine weather had stirred him to an unusually energetic car-washing, and when Emmet wasn’t flipping dirt on me he was “helping” Daddy and “accidentally” squirting me and Caroline with the hose. In the midst of the chaos, and my mounting frustration, our friend Philip stopped by, and started to lure Rob away to talk boats.

“Oh, no! You’re not leaving!” I said, “I’m going to plant my placenta and you have to be here. Philip! You can stay here and say a few words for our ceremony.” Philip is just weird enough to want to hang around for the event, and he can usually be counted on for a speech when one’s needed.

“What ceremony?” asked my husband.

“Rob! The Placenta Burial!” I shouted. “We have to have a ceremony! This an important ritual, we can’t just toss my placenta in a hole and have done with it! He started to edge away. “You have to be here for this!” I yelled, “It’s a ceremony!”

No one argues with a nursing mother shouting from the pile of dirt she’s recently dug – at least no one with any sense. Philip and Rob and Emmet fell into place and waited for me to run inside and get my placenta. It was thawing in the sink, still in its brown bag.

“Okay,” I huffed when I returned. “We have to sing something, and then well all walk over to the hole and Ill put the placenta in and Philip can say a few words – okay?

I realized that I hadn’t really thought this through. I was trying to come up with an instant ceremony, and then Caroline picked that moment to start crying. It’s hard to soothe a baby and bark commands at the same time, but I tried. “Sing something!” I demanded, and then added more gently, “Emmet, honey, you pick a song for us.” He did.

“Oh, the E -RI- E was rising, and the gin was gettin’ low!” he erupted, and then Rob and I joined in on the next line, “And I scarcely think well get a drink til we get to Buffalo, oh, oh, til we get to Buffalo!” It was one of Emmet’s favorites, and what the song lacked in decorum, was more than made up for by volume and earnestness.

We arrived at the hole. Rob held Caroline as I shook out the sack’s contents, which flopped and then lay there glistening in the afternoon sun. My placenta looked … well, it looked like a bloody body part in a hole in the ground. It was still partially frozen and the umbilical cord was wrapped around it. Dirt clung to the flesh, the life-giving flesh that once nourished my child, and all I could think of was: “Gross.” We all stared into the hole for a moment, until I poked Philip, “Well?”

“Sundae.” He grinned, employing a favorite island colloquialism, “That is deeesgusting some.”

“Philip! You were supposed to say something deep and meaningful,” I whined, but I couldn’t help but grin back.

“We’re done, let’s have a beer.” said Rob, and we all laughed, but, honestly, I felt a little let down. My placenta burial was supposed to be a meaningful ritual; I don’t know what I had expected, but it sure wasn’t this. Maybe it wasn’t a guy thing … maybe it would have been better with some women friends … maybe I should have put the placenta in its bowl first … maybe it was just me and my lack of ceremonial finesse.

The planting of the rose bush was rather anticlimactic even though Emmet helped and we sang a few more rounds of the “E-RI-E Canal” song, including his favorite verse: “Oh the cook, she was a grand old gal. She wore a purple dress. We hoisted her to the top of the mast as a signal of distress.”

Thus was Caroline’s rose celebrated as we tamped down the dirt around it. I didn’t feel at one with all of womankind, I felt tired and grubby. And I wondered if there was something missing in our lives – some meaning that my children would miss out on because their parents were so irreverent.

Of course, we told all our friends about the placenta burial, and in the re-telling I began to enjoy it more. It became even funnier when Emmet would chime in on cue and sing his song. It suited us, the way it happened. We are not ceremonial people – we’re not church-goers, or new-agers, or tradition-keepers. We make it up as we go along, and try to find something funny along the way. And it was funny, what Philip said, and true; a hunk of meat in a hole is “deesgusting some”, and those words were way more memorable than any about life-giving nourishment could have been.

Some people thrive on ceremony, some families are good at rituals, some people actually take such things seriously. My family seems to lurch through our rites of passage. We don’t have deeply moving spiritual experiences; we have inappropriate singing and smartass wisecracks. It only makes sense that we would laugh through a made-up ritual in our backyard. No one would actually plan a placenta-burial ceremony around a nonsensical sea-chantey and a flippant oration, but what the hell, it was kinda fun and we weren’t faking it. It was genuinely ours.

As for being in touch with all womankind…. the truth is, I was one with all my ancestresses when I knelt beside that hole. What mother hasn’t been tired and grubby and disappointed and frustrated – and still managed to sing with her kid? We sang a song, buried a bit of the past, planted something for the future, and got up to do the next thing that needed to be done. That’s motherhood for you, and it’s all the ceremony I need.

EX LIBRIS is a zine (a.k.a. newsletter) written and published by me.

I write about books – not book reviews, exactly, but rather book recommendations and explorations. Other book reviews are written as if the book and reviewer exist in a vacuum, but Ex Libris is grounded in the context of my messy life. I’m mostly interested in the places where my reading life and “real” life meet.

I started thinking about Ex Libris several years ago. At that time, I’d been writing a book review column called Island Bookshelf for five years. I was also the editor and chief writer of the local monthly newspaper that my column ran in, and I’d published a few articles in “real” magazines. Writing had become a very central part of my existence, and I wanted to work on something brand new and all mine. I decided that I’d find a wider audience for my ramblings about books by creating one from scratch.

The first issue of Ex Libris was mailed out to friends and family in August of 2005. I’m currently working on Issue 7 (it takes me 3 - 4 months to read, reflect on and write about the dozen or so books featured in each issue.) Even though I love my computer and think the internet is an amazing communication tool, I still prefer to read hard copies, which is why Ex Libris is printed and snail-mailed.

Can’t wait to subscribe?
Subscriptions are $2 per issue; you can sign up for as many issues as you’d like to have. In my next post, I’ll paste in some examples of Ex Libris reviews, so you can make an informed decision to mail me a check to: Sundae Horn
PO Box 544
Ocracoke, NC 27960

Questions? Email me at sundaehorn@embarqmail.com

Welcome to my own little corner of cyberspace!!

The alliterative, eponymous Sundae’s Site represents my attempt to organize and promote my writing, making it easier to find it (and me) when you’re surfing the web.

Most of my writing can find a home in one of these three categories:

Ex Libris: Being a librarious collection of essays, reviews and random thoughts concerning the intersection of life and literature.

mama sundae: Essays and stories about being mama to Emmet, Caroline and Mariah Daisy.

My Island Home: Stories and articles about Ocracoke Island, NC, written for various local and statewide publications.

I’ll post entries into these categories as the mood hits me, or at least once a month. Thanks for checking out Sundae’s Site!