Day Twenty-one- 1/21/11 Setting up Delia's Dollhouse & Clearing Out Her Closet

Day Twenty-one: 1/21/11
New Thing: Setting up Delia’s Dollhouse & Clearing Out Her Closet
Inspiration: Delia, Ali
Cost: $0
Time: Half a day
Bottom Line: Walking down a very long memory lane.

 
Reflection: Today took an interesting turn for me. As I mentioned in previous posts, Fridays are my day off and so I am hoping to try out new styles of prayer those days. That was certainly my plan at the beginning of the day, but I never actually got there. (Don’t worry—for those who want to know what new style of prayer I will be using this week, it will be my new thing of the day tomorrow. For those who do not care for the prayer days—consider yourself forewarned:).
          
Initially, I was planning on shoveling the snow, tiding up a bit, and then have a nice chunk of time for prayers. I had gotten as far the tiding when I stumbled upon a long neglected box. Never underestimate the power of a long neglected box—especially when it is full of childhood wonder. It was like falling down a rabbit hole into my past…well actually my little sister’s past.
         

 This box contained all of the dollhouse paraphernalia from my sister Ali’s dollhouse. Now, Ali and I both had dollhouses growing up. But somehow, and I am really not sure why, Ali’s was always really, really better then mine. Better in both structure and décor. Ali’s house was made of solid, store bought wood with furniture that was specifically designed for it.  It had beds to sleep on, a complete 6-place china tea service including creamer and sugar dish, a china cabinet to keep them in, a refrigerator, sink, stove, fireplace, and, not one, but two miniature butter churns. It even had a miniature old-timey sowing machine.

Mine, on the other hand, was made out of painted particleboard, which had to be continually re-glued through its entire existence since it continued to fall apart. In place of chairs, it had wooden spools of thread. In place of a table, it had several of those little plastic things that looked like tables and came free in the Pizza-Hut boxes to keep the lid from touching the cheese. In place of a fireplace, it had a little picture that I had cut out of a magazine and taped to the wall of the living room. In place of plates, it had nothing. Clearly, this was the poor neighbors house. Actually, since it was a Victorian model, I liked to think that the family of toy trolls that lived there had actually came from old money and now had nothing but this old house to show for their once lavish lifestyle. (I just consulted an old photograph of my dollhouse to see if there was anything else, and it appears that I had at one point made a little flip book on a post-it pad, tacked it to one of the walls and pretended it was a television. I have all my toll-dolls sitting in front of this “moving picture show.”)

But now things are looking up for O’l Hill because when Ali was moving out of our childhood homestead she gave me a lot of our toys including the above mentioned magical box containing the wonderful dollhouse plethora. I was thrilled, but had to wait to let Delia play with it all until I was sure she wouldn’t try to eat any of the pieces.

So, today, when I re-discovered all this, I took the opportunity to set up the house so that she would be surprised to find this new little world when she came home from pre-school. She was indeed delighted and happily played with it for an hour. While she was busy making tea for her little people, I decided to go through all of her old baby clothes that we have had in her closet since we moved here to sort some out for donations. It was very surreal to watch my little girl play with the toys I used to play with (whenever Ali was out of the house) while going through the clothes that she is far to big for now. Sigh. Even though I did not have my planned formal prayer time, I certainly had lots of things to say to God.