I grew a (temporary) organ, and now it’s going to grow this rose.

When you dig a hole deep enough to plant something that wants real roots, you reach soil no one has ever seen. No light has touched it. No hand has moved through it. It's been sitting there in the dark since before any of us got here. That's a wild thing to think about while you're standing in your own backyard with a shovel.

A placenta is kind of the same thing. It's an organ your body grows just for this one baby, and then it's done. No one ever saw it before that pregnancy. No one will ever grow another one exactly like it.

So I put one unseen thing into another. The placenta will break down the way everything in soil breaks down. The nitrogen and the iron and the protein move into the soil, the rose pulls it up through its roots, and turns it into petals and thorns and small pink flowers my son will watch open every summer for the rest of his childhood, if I do this right.