We’re a week from Christmas now. <quote-01>Little green needles are already falling from our Noble Fir down to the presents below<quote-01>. We’ve talked about wrapping up this thing we’ve created, this laying down of letters like hands of cards, round after round in a yearlong game. How do I wrap up all that this conversation has slowly opened in me?

<quote-02>I hear you in my head, Wuck<quote-02>: You don’t have to “wrap up” anything, Hoke. It’s just whatever, and that’s it. Tell me about your last shit, or what you don’t like about Seinfeld, and that’s what it needed to be. Where does <quote-03>this contrived idea of endings<quote-03> even come from? Then you, Murph: Bro. You got this. Bottom of the ninth. It’s like chopping a tree, Hoke. You know how to swing.

There’s so much I haven’t told you—things I usually don’t get to tell my friends because there isn’t a place to. Until now. And things keep happening, things that feel connected to our ever-expanding conversation this year. <quote-04>How do I stop?<quote-04> I said yes to these letters back in January because the chatter of our group’s text threads wasn’t doing it for me. But now these letters have opened up so much of my daily life, different kinds of threads I’m following intently throughout my weeks. 

Last night I re-read the last lines of your most recent letter, Wuck, about how Casey announced he’s a completely different person than he was twenty years ago. It’s still with me now, as I hold Robin; he’s wearing that onesie I made Abram four years ago, the one I scribbled on with a Sharpie: “I’m a reflection of your undeveloped self. <quote-05>Love me<quote-05>.” I think now of that wonderful moment in a recent letter where you’re holding Benjamin on your knees, the two of you facing each other but not really seeing, <quote-06>both feeling invisible to the other as you practice this work of being face to face—the mirroring<quote-06>. I wonder how we’ve mirrored each other this past year, how much we’ve actually seen each other. How has this experience altered us, being more fully witnessed by another, or by two? I look at Robin struggling to breathe—for newborns this simple act of breathing looks like a wonder, a whole-body struggle not yet automatic and mindless—and consider how much we three almost-forty-year-old men are still undeveloped, still like Robin. Have we been stretched to better love one another this year, precisely because we’re seeing more completely each others’ incompleteness?

The wind and rain are howling again. I was laying with Abram in his <quote-07>twin bed<quote-07> a couple hours ago, reading The Polar Express—which you, Murph, told me fourteen years ago to read as I took the Amtrak all the way down the West Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles for my first Christmas home from Washington. As Abram and I were in bed reading it together, we both saw the Christmas lights bouncing wildly in the wind outside his window. Then they went dark, disappeared. “Whoooaaaa,” we both said.

Sideways rain is still slapping the dark windows now, hours later, as I rock tiny Robin and pace the kitchen. I keep writing to you both in my head.

I write to you both about Alex, a friend I met fifteen years ago, the very same night I met Lulo. They were homies back then, and also cellies. I met him as Dirty, his gang moniker. Though I don’t call him that now, that’s who Alex was to me, to everyone, for years. Alex and I spent years writing letters, many of them to and from his solitary confinement cells, as I did with Lulo. I visited him on the streets once during one of his short furloughs between prison sentences. My first website’s homepage featured a photo of Alex and me doing push-ups together in his driveway, between another gangster and a broken Cadillac, a busted basketball hoop above us. Both of our chests nearly to the asphalt, we face each other, mirror each other. We were both skinnier then: he was sucked up and pale, on meth; I was just in my twenties. An aspiring photographer did an entire series, following us for hours, our odd relationship. Some of the shots made it into a local museum. I kept only this one photo of us doing push-ups, eye to eye. Alex went back to prison a few weeks after that day in his brother’s driveway. Inside Walla Walla’s West Complex, he covered his face in more tattoos, tried to become even harder, to hide his shame and heartbreak. He got out of prison just last May, after eight years in maximum security. He’s become the friend I always hoped he would: sober, funny. He texts me pictures of himself in fuzzy, rainbow-colored unicorn pajamas, a pair his fiancée’s daughter dared him to wear. He smiles so big in his selfies you don’t even see the tattoos. He’s also kinda fat now, growing his hair out too, a thick mane gelled handsomely back, covering his inked scalp of skulls and Aztec shields and gang codes. He’s growing a hippie beard now, too.  If either of you saw the Underground promotional videos that came out this last year, you met Alex in the first few seconds. <quote-08>He FaceTimes me several mornings a week, usually after waking up from his night-shift welding job, just to say good morning, maybe from the couch or from his bed, from the toilet or while driving, eyes on the road<quote-08>.

Anyway, as I’ve rocked Robin and thought more about Casey’s assertion, I keep coming back to something Alex said to me one sunny day this summer. It was right before I pushed off in the kayak towards Hope Island with Abram on my lap. He called and told me about a two-day Zoom conference he’d attended for rising leaders with incarceration pasts; one thing a speaker said had stuck with him.

“The dude, he said those of us who’ve left lives of addiction and crime gotta stop saying We’ve changed, always using the word change this and change that. Naw, he said. You’re not changing. You’re healing.”

Alex said he always felt that but didn’t know how to say it until now. “This is who I’ve always been, Chris. This is the real me. I just needed a lotta healing.”

<quote-09>I’m not making that my maxim, not an argument to debate<quote-09>. It’s just stayed with me, if only for how often it seems to be true in the lives of those I love, including my own.

I learned just this year that Alex’s dad died when Alex was still young, before he turned thirteen, close to the age you were, Murph, when your dad died. Complications from alcoholism. I’d never known much of Alex’s story, his past. Part of his healing and growth this past year has been sharing these histories. He told me about his father as we stood in the entryway of his childhood home. He pointed to a framed photo of him while we talked; he looked to be about the same age we are now. It was just one of many family photos framed on his mother’s wall, some staged just like those I’ve seen in the Webber and Murphy households and definitely in my own.

<quote-10>We’re healing<quote-10>.

What about Jesus Sanchez, the man assaulted by the police whom we helped free thanks to surveillance footage, the man who came home this summer to start over, the man I haven’t been able to contact for a month? Well, today I learned that he’s on the run, relapsed on meth and probably too ashamed to tell me. He’s somewhere out there now, <quote-11>running from the work of healing<quote-11>.

I shush Robin’s fussing and soft-step down the short hall to see if the Christmas lights are still up in front. I have to look past the cardboard Black Lives Matter sign we made for a local protest in April and have kept in our front-door window all year. Rachel made it. At the protest, I wore my cleric’s collar and carried a much larger sign reminding folks in their cars and around me in the fray—during Holy Week, days before Easter—that the Resurrection was, after all, God’s undoing of an outdoor government execution of a poor brown man. Not a snappy slogan, really. Cars could only read my message board fully if they caught a red light by the Red Robin. I never got a honk. Rachel sat in the grass along our downtown sidewalk with Abram in her lap and held this small cardboard square: “BLACK LIVES MATTER” with little red hearts around it. Simpler, more tender. Eight months in the front door window, it has bleached a bit from summer’s sun and curled from moisture when the leaves fell. Now there’s a <quote-12>fresh evergreen wreath<quote-12> and matching red ribbon we hung just beneath it after Thanksgiving.

But on the back of this fading sign is another slogan Rachel painted for the protest: “MAMA, I CAN’T BREATHE.” Floyd’s last words, a call to all mothers. That’s a bit intense to keep on your front door year-round. Still, you can see the message from inside our foyer, facing inward through the glass. As I hold Robin and look past this sign and wreath to check on the Christmas lights—still there, thankfully—I back up and again see George’s words. 

We’re not changing. We’re healing.

The wind hammers harder against the house as I change Robin’s diaper on the changing table. I press my forehead to the cold pane, squinting to see the little fig sapling in the far corner of our backyard. There it is.

This is the <quote-13>little sapling<quote-13> I wanted to write you guys about before we wrap this thing up.

Though Rachel has twice opted for an unmedicated birthing process—and both times we’ve been lucky enough to avoid any complications that might have landed us in a hospital—she is not so hippie-dippie as to be interested in keeping the placenta. “Throw that shit in the trash,” she whispered to me during one of our first birthing classes. And months later, just after she’d pushed it out, after I’d cut the empty-white umbilical cord, and minutes after Abram had arrived purple and shivering, I did.

As you both probably know, the placenta—that ribeye-steak-sized power converter on the wall of the uterus, processing and translating everything a human being needs into one single thread—is full of such life-giving stuff that some folks keep, freeze, and ingest it after <quote-14>having it dried, powdered, and pilled into capsules like home-harvested mega-vitamins<quote-14>. This year, when we again checked those boxes at the clinic about whether we wanted to save the placenta, Rachel mentioned something she hadn’t the first time around: some people plant them at the base of trees. My eyes got big. She shook her head.

But minutes after Robin was born last month, as Rachel heaved for breath and Robin took his first, I saw the clinic staff on the other side of the room lay Rachel’s expelled maternal circuit board onto a clean white sheet not unlike butcher paper. I crept over. The new midwife was thrilled at my thrill and waved me closer. “See this?” she said, stretching the clear amniotic sack open from the inside with her splayed latex-gloved fingers.

“That was baby’s little sleeping bag all this time?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said, turning it inside out again to better showcase the huge placenta.

The many veins that fanned across its flesh came together into a single point, the <quote-15>white and hollow<quote-15> umbilical cord. 

“When you look at it like this,” she said, “you can see what some people call the tree of life.”

Sure enough, it looked like an oak tree. But, I considered, its flow reverses the life of trees: from all these veins, these tiny branches, mother’s life flows down into the umbilical trunk, down into newly seeded ground. I thought for a second of the little sapling in my backyard. We marveled at how everything the mother has to offer—blood, oxygen, immune system memory, the building blocks of flesh and bone, eyes that see and cry and ears that hear, all that makes a human life—is synthesized into a single lifeline, this brilliant and temporary nexus. Not a single thread is lost. No wonder people balk at throwing this little miracle into the trash can with the spent latex gloves. No wonder they’ve devised methods to try and harness its powers. As Rachel nursed the newborn, my accomplice slipped this cooling marvel into a Ziploc bag for me and <quote-16>dated it<quote-16>.

It sat hidden in the back of our fridge for a couple days as we rested.

Thanksgiving week, the afternoon after I sent you my last letter, I told Abram to put on his boots and to grab his plastic shovel. We marched through the soft hairs of new green grass growing over our healing backyard, all the way to the farthest corner, where the struggling sapling had just barely survived its fourth full year. Every spring it recovers from winter’s frost, its dull brown nubs brightening into one or two Suessian leaves, maybe one neon bud by September. But always too little too late. Winter comes again.

Out there, Abram pushed his green plastic beach shovel into the dirt beside the sad figling. I helped him spade out more soil to make a sufficiently deep spot beside the fragile roots. He knew well the Ziploc I now opened in the cold light; he’d been talking every day about it: <quote-17>“Daddy, that was inside Mama’s belly. The Plus-Santa.” That’s how he says placenta<quote-17>.

“Yep,” I said. “That’s what helped baby Robin grow. Now we can share it with this little tree, to help it grow.”

“The little tree’s sick,” Abram added. “The umbilical cord Plus-Santa will make it all better.”

“That’s what we hope, bud. Maybe we can help it heal.”

I opened the plastic bag and slipped a cold piece of my wife’s body, my sons’ mother, into the earth. Flop. <quote-18>I felt like weeping but didn’t<quote-18>. It was too close to mortality, this human flesh—even closer than those beautifully downy owl babies we toppled into the future forest. The clean white umbilical cord glistened brightly in the twiggy hole we dug. Abram and I looked at it for another moment. Then we pushed the little mound of dirt and leaves over a piece of his mother and patted it down, not unlike how I tuck him into bed each night.

Later that afternoon, I told Rachel what Abram and I had done. She said she knew, that she’d watched the little ceremony from our new bedroom window, watched as she lay in bed healing and nursing. She showed no disgust or disapproval that I’d kept the placenta. “That’s what I figured you were doing. It was actually,” she paused, “actually really sweet to watch you two.”

<quote-19>Sometimes what first strikes others as foolish—one person’s enthusiasm that sets others’ eyes rolling—moves them in the end<quote-19>. Sometimes we’re surprised how the parts of our lives we don’t much value, the hidden parts that might embarrass or disgust us, become something different, something sweet, in the hands of those who love us.

Almost every day since, Abram has smiled at me and asked, “Daddy, where’s the umbilical cord?” I keep thinking that he’s asking about where things are in our bodies and I point to his belly button; then he corrects me: “No, it’s outside! We planted it. With the little tree.”

And so that’s where I look now: out the back window in the middle of the night, in the middle of the storm. I can’t see it through the dark. Probably due to reading your last letter, Murph, I whisper a blessing to it through the rain-splattered window: “Good luck.”

And I wonder about the goodness of these practices: not throwing away the hidden material of our lives, the stuff that forms us, but instead finding small places in which to sow these common mysteries. Not just because some friendships are like struggling saplings in need of the richer material, but also because it feels like a waste to throw it away, not to share it, sow it, somewhere.

As I reach the bottom of this year-long letter—these pages filled with our three hearts—and, shutting my laptop, gently pat it closed, I feel no grief. There’s a difference between burying and planting what we have.