This is Ann Marie Leonard...I call her the doll whisperer...she has spent a lifetime...53 years so far...designing dolls (most of those in the cabinet behind her)...selling them at gift fairs...and repairing them...as you see her below...working to reattach the fingers on Mom's beloved Bye Lo baby doll...
Although it looks like it could be, this is not Mom's original Bye Lo doll...the family story about what happened to that one ends in mystery...
As Mom tells it, she received the original doll as a gift from her parents when she was just four years old...and she loved it more than any other toy she owned...so much so, she gave it a birthday party every year until she was eight...
That's when she began elocution lessons...she was assigned to practice the phrase "My dolly died"...the repetition of which sparked the idea to have a burial ceremony...for the Bye Lo doll...
Since Mom was the only girl child in the family...and on her block...she enlisted her brother and the neighborhood boys to help out...usually, they would ignore her or refuse to let her play with them...but because dirt was involved, and they would be able to dig a grave, they eagerly agreed...she even talked them into being pallbearers...
Her mom, my Grandmother Lula...aka Lulabelle...built the coffin...made from a boot box, Lulabelle lined it in satin...and added a pillow to hold the doll's head...
At the appointed time, Mom and the boys gathered for the graveside service...under the expansive oak tree in the backyard...Mom in her mosquito net that served quite well as a veil...she remembers standing over the coffin and sobbing her eyes out...as Bye Lo baby was lowered into the ground and put to rest...
At midnight that night, it began to rain...hard enough...and long enough...that it awakened Mom from a deep sleep...her first thought was that the pelting rain might be injuring her doll...so she flew out of bed...ran into the backyard...and began exhuming the grave...
To Mom's horror, Bye Lo baby had gone bye-bye...no baby doll...no coffin...only the remnants of flower petals she had strewn on the grave...and plead as she might, she never found out what happened to her doll she loved with her whole heart...only she and the boys knew where Bye Lo was buried...and none of the were talking...now all of them are dead...to a man, including her own brother, they went to the grave with the secret...
That would be the end of the story...except that a few years ago, having heard it, a neighbor brought Mom the Bye Lo doll in the photo...it was intact when Mom got it, but an unsuspecting friend touched the doll's hand and the fingers fell off...Ann Marie explained to us that the hands are made of celluloid that becomes brittle with age...as the latex filling inside the fingers shrinks over time, they become more and more fragile...
I have only two things to say about any of this...the first is to be aware of the power of your attention to hold on to old hurts...if you allow it, they can last a lifetime...and, second, if you ever need a doll whisperer, Ann Marie is your gal...