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Making Meanings
     Wed 2 Dec 2009 12:00am
 
Simple gifts. To me, these are gifts that cost little – of me or of the environment – but are immeasurably filled with love and human connections. One such gift was the doll. Years ago, when I still lived on the Vermont Farm, my soon-to-be sister-in-law found a china doll’s head among some rubble by the brook. We cleaned it up and her little face was so beautiful. We imagined a little girl who had perhaps lived on that farm decades before who had loved that doll until all that was left was her bald head. “I’m going to re-create this doll and give it to your first-born child,” I joked. The doll’s head lay in a drawer, waiting.
 
When the first baby was announced, I got to work. I researched the origins of the head – not a valuable antique, but a popular style of an earlier era. I found a source where one could buy the cloth body, china hands and feet, and curly brown hair. I called the former owners of the farm – two maiden ladies, professional nurse educators, long retired, who had come up to the farm every summer starting in the late 1930s to get away from the heat of New York City. Did they know anything about the doll? “No,” they acknowledged, but they did know that the place we found it had been a dumping area for the owners before them (and likely many before that). The farm buildings dated back to the 1830s.
 
I took the doll – now embodied – to show “The Ladies” as we lovingly called them. They were fascinated and, like me, so emotionally attached to the farm that we spent an afternoon spinning out stories about the doll and children who may have played with it. That’s when The Ladies pulled out an old a trunk filled with, among other things, antique doll cloths, inherited and lovingly preserved. Together we began outfitting the doll. Soon she had a civil war-era silk dress that a distant relative had made by hand.  
 
Next, my friend who is a costume designer helped me design and make the doll’s period-perfect under clothes. And finally, I wrote the letter that I hope will travel with the doll wherever she goes; it chronicled how a-not-yet-mother found its head and how my friends and I “brought her back to life” for a just-born little girl. It told the story of the people who had loved the doll back into being – and, in the process, loved each other. My financial investment was minimal; the story was (and still is) priceless.  
 
Join us on Saturday, December 12 for our “Simple Gifts” Village Worship (an interactive worship service for people from teeny tiny to great and grand). Then come to the Simple Gifts Swap. I don’t guarantee you’ll find a valuable treasure, but I can assure you you’ll have the invaluable experience of giving and sharing love and connections. Believe me, you’ll feel “you’ve come down right.”

   Katie Lee  

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