What if every woman in America went on strike. Today. Indefinitely. No woman shows up for their fast- food job, their nighttime cleaning job, teaching job, daycare, nursing, doctoring, lawyering, retail clerking, banking, government and social service, bus driving….

EVERY WOMAN GOES HOME and stays there: to take care of her children, her aging parents, her grandchildren, her husband on disability, her toddler without access to preschool, her teenager under home detention or detox or covid quarantine. She picks up the clutter. She washes the dishes. She catches up with the mountain of laundry. She shops for groceries in several places to find the most economical buys. She devises a budget and holds everyone in check from their anti-social impulses. She shows up at school to make sure the kids are being respected, encouraged, and educated in the essentials, like reading.

You know. She does all these things (and more) that someone managing a home and family has to take care of. In the absence of childcare, hired help, home health care assistance, a domestic partner, and simple access to routine, urgent, and emergency medical care, she has to do it all. Not going out “to work” will free her time to perform these vital activities on society’s behalf.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ALL THE WOMEN STAY HOME?

Today, with the threatened removal of the protection of Roe v. Wade, WOMEN once again will be weighted beyond human endurance by the burden of Old White Male assumptions about how things in real life get done.

Let it be said: NO ONE believes that abortion is a good thing. However, the personal freedom to make a decision about giving birth belongs to every woman without government interference.

The government seems perfectly happy not to provide for child care and health care and public education, even when supporting families and a healthy population would seem favorable for the function of…everything.

Use this exercise in imagination to notice that individuals are not independent entities. Neither are families, neighborhoods, cities, states, and nations. We are one human family. We function by free choice, if at all possible, in the entanglement of life.

As the saying goes, “The truth will set you free.” And the ultimate truth is: We are loved without boundaries by the creator of the universe, and we are called to love others the same way.

If we don’t, and choose to keep destroying each other, I’m certain that the creator has infinite other plans.

April Fools’ Day has come and gone. This is no joke.

You may have noted the warning passed around on social media that children “identifying” as cats or dogs are being permitted to bark and meow in the classroom and might even be provided with a litter box in the restroom.

I just wanted to offer a personal anecdote to reassure those who are worried about the possibility that somewhere educators are affirming “furries” in schools. For one thing, there’s nothing new about children claiming an animal identity.

I hereby confess that at the age of 8 or so—third or fourth grade—I identified as a horse. At recess, with likeminded friends, I would assume my Stallion persona. Let loose in the large field that was our playground at the time, I galloped. I neighed. I pawed the ground. I corralled my “mares” (those cooperative friends) in our designated stable under a large tree. Sometimes, I would lodge a pencil between my teeth and pretend I was wearing a bit and a bridle. Galloping around the neighborhood with a pencil in my teeth was surely dangerous, if not deranged. But as I shook my “mane” in defiant wild horseness, I was a free child.

What do I know about today’s kids? I’ve never given birth. In fact, my life is pretty much child-free, as my relatives including “steps” are now mostly grown-ups. I don’t have a close association with little ones in school or church. So, clearly, I don’t know anything about the joys and terrors of parenting, especially the worry that something might be fundamentally wrong with one of my own–including a disposition to behave like something other than a human critter. Parents no doubt have reasons to be wary of social influences and other features of America today. However, I believe that a child’s identification as a “furry” isn’t one of them.

Truth is, from my wide-ranging reading, I associate the term “Furries” with a society of like-minded adults who gather at conferences where they dress up as their preferred animals: cat, dog, lion, wombat, kangaroo….and socialize. Other than the costumes, their friendships and activities are pretty much what other adults do at a gathering of accountants or college professors or politicians. These sociable Furries pose no threat to me or you.

Go ahead. Be a Furry. It’s a free country. Meanwhile, kids who “identify” as lions and tigers and bears for recreational purposes will get some exercise. They will eventually outgrow the playfulness that derives from their imaginations. In fact, that’s too bad. We could all use more imagination, playfulness, and humor in our everyday lives.

As I’ve said many times in this series of essays: FEAR NOT

Fear is the driving force behind racism, violence, and despair. Fear of some other way of thinking, dreaming, being. But as to our humanity, there is no “other.” Let’s try to get our heads and hearts around that scientific fact.

How and when the book came to be in my Kindle library I don’t exactly know. Perhaps I noticed the bright red cover during a search for something else. My curiosity piqued, I clicked and bought it and forgot about it. So there it was, waiting, when I found myself “between books.”

What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon turned out to be a stunning eye-opener. It’s about living, or trying to, as a conspicuously, immensely FAT person. According to Wikipedia, the author is a known podcaster and activist. You can look her up. Her passionate and well-documented book, published in 2020, details the issues confronting noticeably FAT people every day of their lives, beginning, in many cases, as children bullied in school. At no time and in no place, as Gordon recounts in detail, does a FAT person find empathy, accommodation, and care.

These days we are bombarded with conversation about civil rights afforded to people with differences ranging from color to gender identity to citizenship status to dis/ability. What we do not hear, let alone see, is the universal discrimination in every possible category against people described in medicine as obese or morbidly obese, in fashion as plus-size, and bluntly in everyday encounters as FAT. We watch them warily as they walk toward our row of seats on airplanes. We peer into their grocery carts. We look sideways at them as they eat a dish of Dairy Queen smaller than the one we ourselves are slurping, wondering how those calories are adding up on their enormous bodies.“Them” I say, for we non-FAT people may often be thinking, in our pleasantly zaftig self-satisfaction, “At least I don’t look like them.”

Reading Gordon’s well-documented chapters lighted up my brain with evidence of the manifold methods by which FAT people are rendered less than human by…everybody. Yes, everybody.

I used to think I had a dog in this hunt. From adolescence on, I’ve wrestled with what I call my “weight management issue.” That is, I have a strong hereditary tendency to accumulate fat on my body. I’ve been so successful with “weight management” that few people who know me would ever suspect that I consider myself a FAT person contained in a temporarily non-FAT body. At the age of 75, I have acquired dietary facts and habits, ingrained and sustained over literally decades, aimed at keeping that FAT person from ever showing up. Over the years, I’ve offered an educated and encouraging voice to other people who share what we call our “weight loss journey” at whatever stage we find ourselves. I have worked hard at not being a FAT person. What was my personal motivation? Well, that’s another story.

What I’ve missed, however, in my celebration of successes and my forgiveness of failures in this lifelong challenge, is this: being FAT makes no one less worthy of respect for their human dignity, appreciation for their talents and capabilities, and insistence on their civil rights, whether or not they are able to “fix” themselves as I (deeply, secretly) believe they should (read: like I DID!) In my heart, I have remained a Mean Girl to FAT people, oblivious to their human worth as is.

I call this blindness, in myself and almost everyone else, an unacknowledged frontier of human rights activism and justice–in employment, medical care, education, transportation, social and romantic expectations, and so much more. Next time you catch yourself glancing furtively at a FAT person, examine your thoughts. Like me, you may have missed the most pernicious prejudice of all that pervade American life today.

Note: This little essay was written many days before war came to Ukraine. With many others in countries around the world, I stand without words in view of the courage and grief of the people of Ukraine. Please reach out with love in any way you can today.

I thought I was over it. Guess not. Recently, on the back cover of a book of poetry, I read the following comment: “These poems rip up the Hallmark card and replace it with the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world.” Something inside me bristled. Again. Still. Rip up the Hallmark card? Rip my heart out.

I’ve been retired since 2008. Before that, for a goodly chunk of forty-one years, I was a writer for, yes, Hallmark Cards. I was hired there in 1967, with a fledgling bachelor’s degree in English from a modest public college. (You can read more about that on the opening pages of this blog). My job at the outset? To compose four to eight lines of rhymed verse that delivered Happy Birthday, Happy Mother’s Day, Merry Christmas, Sorry You’re Sick, etc.—we called them sentiments—in some way never before uttered. We were not permitted to say anything “too restrictive” (that is, not likely to be true for absolutely everybody) and we always had to end with an upbeat wish. Does this sound easy? I spent an entire year tossing my college girl notions of originality and poetry into the wastebasket. Every single day, I expected to be fired for incompetence.

For now, let’s set aside what may be easy or not easy about the writing itself. Painfully, I learned the truth: greeting cards are not poetry. However, I will forever defend the greeting card, by now evolved into a vast genre of styles and subjects, as the writing that may best meet “the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world.”

Good readers might occasionally choose a book of poems by Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Wendell Berry or Emily Dickinson as a gift for a friend in celebration or sympathy. Most people, though, unable or unwilling to compose their own thoughts, will find, somewhere in the acres of greeting cards on display, a message that is both truthful and genuine, with an artful spin, or perhaps a note of humor.

Why should poets with their neurotic whining possess a higher claim to the task of bringing comfort and hope to fellow beings than a greeting card writer? A greeting card message, whatever the occasion, is about YOU, the recipient–and certainly not about the anonymous writer. Even a perfunctory greeting card message conveys the fact that the sender meant to reach out with a personal intention of kindness. Why should the “difficult, demanding claims of love” exclude the assurance of hope and human caring in a simple greeting card message?

Please. Stop this comparison. Let Hallmark be. Let it be a beacon of optimism and love in that imperfect world. Everybody needs it.

P. S. I don’t write greeting cards anymore, but if you’d like to reach out to somebody with poetry, please consider one or two or three of my books: Road Trip, Windshift, The Beekeeper and other love poems, all available at amazon. Thank you!

I’ve just enjoyed a visit with one of my sisters who lives not far from me. Her home, which she and her husband envisioned and built a few years ago, is an architectural work of art built of glass and wood and native stone. The inside is all light and space for hospitality. When I dropped in, she had just taken delivery on the last element of her interior design: four chairs for the living room. A perfect fit for the style of her home, they are geometric, with shiny metal frames and delicious red fabric cushions. At the moment, she has them draped with “stinger” pads to discourage the dogs—three friendly and rambunctious bull terriers—from claiming them forever as theirs.

As I write this, I’m looking around my own home, which I moved into, together with my new husband, in 2013. There could be no greater contrast in style and sensibility to my sister’s house. In the first place, our house was built in 1908: three stories, Arts & Crafts woodwork, creaky floors, clunky radiators (but excellent hot water heat), and a history of remodels and revisions that hold mysteries and oddities we can barely fathom, whether of usage or of DIY engineering. Furnishings accumulated from each of our earlier lives range from Early American to Stickley to all-purpose Traditional (i.e., a bargain at Wayfair or Costco, a flea market find). For comfort anyway, our home gives Eclectic the best possible definition. The house and its contents hold many old stories.

Clearly, my sister and I both enjoy the enormous privilege of choosing where, and with what objects, we want to live. Some of the objects in our respective homes were inherited from our parents, who, in our formative years, moved us from place to place to place as a military family. Those places included Japan, Libya, Spain, and more than half-a-dozen states. Certain tables, lamps, framed art, figurines, and dishes commemorate those various locations. Indeed, the two of us grew up most of the time with a household décor genially labeled Early Air Force.

Here’s where my mind takes its philosophical leap. Two sisters growing up together (only three years apart in age) have taken very different roads in at least one aspect of life: our surroundings. Do we have divergent experiences and opinions in other ways? Of course. Once in a while, our views collide. But we are good friends. She is relentlessly generous and forgiving. I remain, I hope, open to conversations, even disagreements, that make me think. In truth, hers is the most steadfast lifelong love I know.

We remain, as we have always been, two highly independent women. What are the teachings and the tools, the boundaries and the liberties, which enabled us to become our own unique selves? Well, that would be a memoir of hundreds of pages, which I’m not aiming to write just now.

However, I will say that being encouraged to ask questions, explore options, develop skills, take risks, and move beyond disappointments all added up, from childhood to now. I’ve always figured that the goal of our parents (our mother in particular) was not to mold us but to launch us. And sure enough, off we both went in the trajectory of life, in different directions. Equally good.

By the way, we two sisters have two younger siblings: a sister and a brother. We’re all in our senior years now. And, as you might guess, all four of us lead different lives—different in education, geography, family constellations, work experience, personal challenges, religious persuasion, and more. What’s important, it seems to me, is that we are all alike in character, including the aspiration to goodness, love, and mutual encouragement. Where did we get that?

At the top of my desktop computer monitor, I have just reinstalled (with fresh cellophane tape) a little plastic “prayer card” I bought at a local store that sells myriad devotional supplies for Kansas City Catholics. I like the fragrance in there, among other things. Candles. Incense. Books fusty in spirit, if not in age. Rosaries. Figures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus sized for dashboards or home prayer corners or church altars. Wandering around in this store, as a lifelong mainline Protestant, I feel a bit bereft of some elements of awe and worship that my tradition has typically rejected. Occasionally I step over the line. My prayer card, with its admonition from a 16th century Carmelite nun and mystic, has become my mantra (to mix up the traditions of one faith and yet another.)

Do not be afraid.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things are passing away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
Whoever has God
Lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

St. Teresa of Avila

I admit to a certain irony, in view of the fact that I have pasted that little card over the camera on my computer lest someone use it to spy on me, with or without the alert of the little green light. At times, I’ve shown up fuzzy on my ZOOM square, having forgotten to remove the protective prayer card. Am I really afraid of being spied on via my own computer? Dunno.

Over time, regarding this card, I have come to realize that the admonition from St. Teresa most apt to my usual state of mind is actually this one: Patience obtains all things. Does that apply to the endless irritating waits while the “beachball of death” tells me that my computer is “thinking” but not delivering the information I demand immediately? That’s only the iceberg tip of my impatience. I might embrace the illusion that I live life fearlessly. But patiently? Not so much.

And so my thoughts leap to the thing of the day.

A pundit in the Washington Post, Lawrence Downes, comments on the recent kerfuffle in the Catholic Church over the exact wording of the rite of baptism. Apparently, in Phoenix, a long-serving priest, in an effort to be inclusive in a modern sense, used the word “we” instead of “I” in pronouncing the blessing of baptism. According to higher authorities (but only as high as The Vatican), this mistake nullified the effectiveness of perhaps thousands of baptisms and subsequent marriages. Downes says drily, “Will God overlook this mistake and embrace the blameless faithful anyway, or will he be a jerk about it?” I say, with St. Teresa:Do not be afraid.

Daily headlines indicating that the inmates are running the asylum worldwide provide enough reasons to fear, if you let details like gun violence, mass starvation, the demise of democracy, and universal economic collapse bother you. Never mind, I insist, what the wording was of your baptism, or even whether or not you were baptized, or even whether or not you “believe in God.”

I have two books on my Kindle which feed my current reflections: The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graeber and Wengrow (anthropology professor and professor of comparative archaeology, respectively) and The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack (theoretical astrophysicist). I lean towards astrophysics above anthropology as an area of interest, especially when it comes to my faith and theology. I find speculation about dark matter and dark energy more intriguing than speculation about the Dark Ages (and long ages before that). Point being: all our science and technology and psychology and human history have barely made a dent in what we don’t know. Furthermore, at this stage of human development (using the term loosely) we can no longer throw “God” into that immense vacancy as an excuse for ignorance, let alone for violence against other human beings.

For today, let me declare, in faith: God’s got this.

In the past two months, I’ve been a bystander in the deaths of six people within my circle of family and friends. None was from Covid. None from violence. Not all were elderly—-that is, my age, when death inevitably moves closer and closer to home. What shall I be afraid of?

Perhaps there was a dawn of everything, meaning human consciousness and the mystery of the mind. Perhaps there will be an end of everything in a sudden bubble of destruction called vacuum decay. What has this got to do with how I feel, how I act, how I live this very morning as I write?

All I can really do is call your attention, whoever you are, to the sheer grace and beauty of creation, the miracle that you’re a part of it, and the absolute assurance that you are loved.

Just say yes, okay, I get it. Do not be afraid.

Hello, World. I’m back. It’s been a while. Here it is, the middle of February already in a brand-new year, and my Blog folder is empty. It’s not that I haven’t been writing. A few poems. A vast number of emails. Journal entries every day. It’s not that I haven’t poured out written opinions of current events, as the editors of the local newspaper will attest. Why have I neglected my most personal space in the universe of the written word? Perhaps it’s my fault in not generating more “traffic” to my blog, and not tuning in more intentionally to what my readers, if any, might say back to me. Except for a few kind and faithful friends who often post their acknowledgments, I have no idea who may be finding their way to this page or what they may be thinking. I suppose I could fix that with better advertising or the appropriate links. But why?

I’m writing now for one urgent reason: yesterday the internet connection in our house failed. About ten o’clock in the morning, signals on my computer screen told me something had gone wrong. Then began a scramble to figure out what, and how to fix it. That’s when the stark realization dawned that I’d lost track of the do-it-yourself protocol, the phone numbers, the passwords, the account information, and—most importantly, the internet connection!—that would assist me in finding the solution. [Word of advice: Update your records of those things right now, and keep them handy.] Eventually I was able to have a phone conversation, first with a polite robot with the voice of a movie hero, and then with a live, optimistic, and carefully scripted helper somewhere in Asia. A service call was arranged to take place in late afternoon or evening the same day. All I could do was…wait. Not my best ability.

The reality of being CUT OFF from the Internet ground into the day, hour after hour.

Now it is morning of the second day. Last night’s timely visit from the service person determined that a squirrel (damn their fuzzy little faces!) had probably chewed through an outdoor wire some 270 feet from the terminal in our house. The knowledgeable and efficient service guy could pinpoint the location via his instruments, but was unable to perform the fix, in the dark, by himself. So now…I wait, hopefully, for further assistance.

All this jabber serves to explain my discovery (already known, really) how utterly dependent, addicted, life-support-connected I have become to The Internet. It isn’t just the pandemic, which has isolated so many of us in our homes. I’m sure my dependency preceded that enforced hermitude. Each week, a pop-up box on my screen tells me how many hours I have spent in front of the screen, with an average up or down from the previous week. Would I feel less guilty about eight hours and six minutes spent reading a book? Why??

As of now, I actually have spent eight hours and six minutes (and more) reading a book and the latest Atlantic (the articles always too long to sit still for!) and some poetry. We watched a movie via DVD on our neglected tv, an amusing and worthwhile thing to do together, rather than bury our noses in our separate feeds from Netflix or Prime. I picked up what appeared to be important emails on my phone, and emailed friends to inform them of the reason for my “radio silence.” However, the tiny screen and tiny keyboard of the phone will never accommodate my capacity to reach out. So here I sit typing a blog post which will go nowhere until…the internet is recovered.

Maybe this cutting-off is actually a breakthrough. Of awareness. Of gratitude. Of patience—I need that lesson the most. Because you are reading this, thank you for you. We are clearly friends, and I’m happy to be part of your tribe as you are part of mine. Have a blessed day. And keep in touch.

And…here’s the service truck, parked at the curb. You are reading this because we got fixed. Whew.

Multi-colored lights outline the eaves of our front porch.  From the street, passers-by can see through a faceted glass door into the front hall where the Christmas tree glitters. Closer up, that tree shows the tatters of many trips up and down the basement stairs.  Some of its branches droop. At least half of its original white lights have died, made up for by several hundred colorful new ones strung on.  Christmas lights, indoors and out, bring me joy at the holiday season. I like to think that people who display them, even in outrageous excess, actually do celebrate the “true meaning” of Christmas and choose to make public their spiritual hopes along with their decorative exuberance.

As to that “true meaning….”  A thoughtful and discerning study of the Bible, especially the Gospels, quickly reveals that our beloved Nativity Story is, well, not exactly what happened. It conflates, perhaps even fabricates, accounts of the birth of Jesus written decades after the fact (assuming it is a fact), according to some interpretive intention of the writer for the target audience.  Do the absolute facts matter? Depends on whom you ask. As for me, I merely wish that the Christmas spirit of love, generosity, hope, and kindness might prevail in the midst of greed, suffering, violence, and fear. Perhaps the lights of Christmas serve as a reminder for a little while anyway. And Christians still derive wonder and joy from that story, which ties together the entire Bible narrative.

With my small Bible study group, I’m discussing a series of lessons entitled What My Grandmothers Taught Me: Learning from the Women in Matthew’s Genealogy of Jesus. Inspired by the handful of women (literally—only five) included in this study, I made a list of my own. So far, I’ve noted twenty-nine women, from Eve to Priscilla. I’m calling them “women out of bounds,” based on the fact that Bible writers viewed most of them as outsiders in one way or another. Frankly, I don’t trust history (or philosophy or even science) written one hundred per cent from the perspective of men. Yet if men have made up stuff over the millennia, why can’t I?  Perhaps in time I’ll write my own essays or poems about each of those twenty-nine women who challenged and changed Bible history, even if most people never heard of most of them. Meanwhile, I plan to participate in making history in the world now.

Speaking of which, if you are not reading The 1619 Project, perhaps you should.  You need to make up your own mind about it.  Who wrote the history of America?  Whose voices and experiences were not included?  To whom have the noble principles of “liberty and justice for all” applied, and whose voices and experiences and contributions and hopes got left out?

Jesus might not recognize much of the story told about him in the Bible.  Most of the “facts” cannot be known, and Christians have been busy for two thousand years sorting it all out to suit themselves in countless interpretations. Right now, in America, we are living our own history. Facts can be known.  Ideals can be embraced.  Light can shine in the darkness.  Could be up to us.

Hello, Blog!  What use is having a space like this if I’m not going to think out loud in it? The friend to whom I write emails almost daily will vouch for the fact that I’m not without opinions and reactions concerning current events, poetry doings, and general philosophy. Yesterday, alerted by another poet friend, I found myself quoted on someone else’s blog from this blog!  I was flattered. It felt like being a little bit famous.

I am prompted to philosophy today by the sudden death last week of a poet* highly regarded in the poetry circles with whom I connect. As I lamented in my poem “Obituary”—So she is dead before we even thought/that she was sick…

In emails, Facebook posts, and forum conversations, she is universally praised for both her poetry and her personality.  Her recently published poetry collection remains as a legacy we can all turn to in admiring remembrance. But her beautiful present—and presence—has been ripped from the earth. Me?  Well, I can no longer be considered “too young” to suddenly die.

All my life, I have been adamantly future-facing.  This is a good thing in that it compels me to be always considering what I will do next, rather than dwelling on what I’ve done already.  Hopes and ambitions seem to motivate me a great deal more than achievements and rewards.

This way of approaching life becomes especially vivid to me while I’m reading the work of dozens of living poets in books, literary magazines, and online. In their bios, they list their publications, awards, degrees, and nominations for prestigious prizes.  These lists tend to remind me of the many credits I have not accumulated, while obliterating from my mind the many credits I have.

I wrote a poem about that called “Poet Envy.”  It begins, Remember, darling, you are no one else.  And it ends, …There’s ever only one of you. My perpetual discomfort seems to lie in not knowing when enough is enough, or perhaps when I am enough.

I wrap it all up in my poem “Old Lady With No Complaints”—My bit in time seems infinitely small/its prizes insufficient after all.

So, what IS the prize I seek?  What is the thing I’ve been chasing after for seventy-five years?

Oh, that’s easy:  Love.

I don’t mean romantic love (but surely that) or family love (definitely that) or the love of an audience (obviously that).  I want even more.  I want the biggest, deepest, most unconditional, eternal, delightful love a human being can experience.

Can you imagine what my idea of “God” looks like?

*Susan de Sola [Rodstein], author of Frozen Charlotte from Able Muse Press.

Somehow I discern a living intelligence in their eyes–possibly in the same way I imagine conversation with my cat.  Behind their neutral but pleasant expressions, I sense the histories and stories these dolls were created to represent.  And I love them.

I’m talking about four American Girl dolls who occupy a corner of my study.  They are Addy, whose story involves escaping from slavery; Kaya, a Nez Perce girl whose story takes place only a generation prior to the first contact with white people; Marisol, a modern girl of Mexican heritage living in Chicago; and BJ, the first of my little family of dolls, who has my (formerly) red hair and, I presume, my huge affection for having and acquiring sisters.

I grew up with two sisters, one older and one younger.  Belonging to a military family during my first thirteen years, I knew my sisters as my only everywhere friends, and they still are.  Oh, we had our share of quarrels, I’m sure.  But nothing fatal to the bonds of love and affection and mutual encouragement we share to this day.  I was, however, the only sister with a passion for dolls.  My younger sister could be persuaded to cooperate in doll play, with real dolls or celebrity paper dolls or dolls cut out of the Montgomery Ward catalog.  But I was the one who cherished them, from my very first baby doll to the Madame Alexander fashion doll who is with me still.

No wonder, when Hallmark was engaged to create auxiliary products for the American Girl brand for which I was a writer, I was smitten by the idea of obtaining an American Girl doll of my own.  Who’s to say no?  Thus came BJ into my life—named with my initials.  Eventually, I owned seven dolls, representing the historic American Girl stories of Molly, Josefina, Addy, and Kaya, plus Marisol, BJ, and a pretty blonde who filled out the representation of my real sisters.  Three dolls were eventually adopted out to other little girls.  Now the four remain, along with their respective wardrobes and storybooks.  Their sweet, inviting faces beam at me every day.

I’ve long since stopped accumulating accessories for this quartet.  If you’re familiar with the American Girl brand, you know it provides infinite opportunities to spend money. Sometimes I peek at the catalogs, but firmly resist.  I’m at the stage of life where deaccessioning is the necessary decision. I have enough. Every now and then, perhaps with the change of seasons, I drag out the trunks and boxes from under a bed. I sit on the floor with the dolls, the dresses, the hairbrushes, the shoes…and play.  The girls seem grateful every time for the refreshed outfits.

When I was a Sunday school girl, we learned a little song that goes like this:

Jesus loves the little children,

all the children of the world:

red and yellow, black and white,

they are precious in his sight.

Jesus loves the little children of the world.

I like to think that my girls remind me every day that all the children of the earth are precious, no matter how old they are.  Each one has a story.  We are a family.