My trip up the road

I've been known to procrastinate. I've even done a fair amount of chipmunking. But yesterday I decided to turn over a new leaf. I finally called the doll lady--someone I'd been referred to by folks at a local appraisal fair. For years my mother's doll has been sitting in a back closet....naked, with a bad wig.

A sweet old lady answered the phone. I love calling elder people because they usually always answer and I don't have to deal with voice mail--that bottomless pit of despair. It's so refreshing. She insisted I bring dolly right over.

"We're just up the road," she said. "You can't miss us. It's the house with all the birdhouses on the front porch."

So dolly and I set off down the road, and oh how I wish I was more brazen with my camera. The house was a treasure--a colonial, built in the 1700's, with creaky, uneven wood floors and lots of rooms and plenty of musty smell. It had character. Not to mention, dolls in every nook and cranny. There was a whole neighborhood of birdhouses too, just like she said, and none with a vacancy.

She and her husband, who identified himself as the doll doctor, took a look at dolly and told me a few things about her. She was probably made sometime around 1920. Her eyes used to blink, but a peek inside her head (doc did an abbreviated autopsy) revealed they had been opened and fixed with plaster at one time. Her wig was likely not original because black hair would have been very unusual on a doll of this kind. And, sadly, she isn't a rare doll--as the original appraiser hinted at based on her markings, but just an average dolly of her day.

They suggested I might insure her, but as with most things today the market isn't what it used to be. I'd be better off, they said, to clean her up, fluff up her hair, and dress her in something nice so she can be displayed.

So now I'm wondering what Grandma ("Oh my stars!") Ferna would do. She used to make clothes for my dolls on her old treadle machine. She'd fold some fabric, lay the doll down on it, and snip, snip, snip. In no time at all, a pretty new dolly dress would appear.

Could I possibly work some of that same kind of grandma magic? Just fold and snip and sew? I guess it's worth a try. I've certainly got plenty of fabric, and I don't have to treadle like she did. I wonder what she'd say if she knew? Oh wait. I think I hear her whispering something in my ear now.

"Oh, for pity's sake!"