A visit to the doll museum

After a long ride in a conveyance the big people call a car we arrived at a most unusual place, a town called Vicksburg, Mississippi. We drove through historic downtown and parked next to a huge boat then traveled by foot to a museum called Yesterday's Children. 

I found the name to be almost as neat as what it contained. 

Dolls.

Hundreds of them. Old dolls, newer dolls. Big dolls, little dolls. You name it they seemed to have it. I was so overwhelmed with at the dolls and their wonderful clothing that I did not, at first, know where to start. 

"Lett's find our cousins." Orange Blossom announced, looking around in a bewildered sort of way. "Where do you suppose they keep the Hitty's in this place?"

"Who knows? I shrugged and turned in a circle. Did they even have Hitty's? And if so, how might one go about finding them in a place with so many different dolls that you couldn't even count them all?

"Well, these certainly aren't them." Orange Blossom pointed to dolls that were a hundred times our size, if not bigger.

But they were beautiful. Their hair had real curls and not just wooden carved on ones. And their dresses... Oh, there dresses. So pretty with all the satin and lace. I looked down at my own dress, picked special for this trip, a lovely frock I borrowed from Merry, since she refuses to wear it and because it has Raggedy Ann dolls on it.  I love my borrowed dress but it was nothing compared to the lovely dresses the other dolls wore. 

"We will look high and low until we find the Hitty's." Orange Blossom declared, grabbing my hand and marching off at a determined pace.

And she did mean high. She picked the highest shelf in the whole place to look for Hitty's but there were none to be found. 

"Where are the Hitty's? Orange Blossom hissed in my ear.

"I don't know what a 'Hitty' is girly but you ladies can just head on back where you came from." A disgruntled voice thundered out from the shelf. "This shelf is for ventriloquists only."

Orange Blossom took off. Her skirts swirled around her ankles. I had to run to keep sight of her amidst all the other dolls. Dust puffed up in a cloud almost thick enough to block her from my sight.

I found her hiding in a doll carriage, behind a doll holding a sign that said she was over a hundred years old. She had certainly aged well, she didn't look a day over a year. 

"Is it safe?" Orange Blossom peeked out from behind the doll baby's head. "Did they follow us?"

"I don't think so." I look back the way we had come but all the ventrilo...whatever they were dolls had stayed high on their shelf. "No. We're safe."

"Good. Those things shouldn't even be allowed to be called dolls. I think they were monsters. Did you see their snappy jaws? I bet they could have just gobbled us right up."

"I saw them." And I hadn't liked them one bit. "Maybe we could call my carver and see if she could recarve them into friendly dolls."

"Good idea." Orange Blossom climbed out of the carriage and dropped to the floor in a cloud of dust. "Someone sure forgot to clean this place."

"I don't think they clean the places little six inch dolls fit into." At least not the places that scared little dolls fit into anyway.

"We can mark the carriage and the vinny dolls off the possible places where the Hitty's are kept." Orange Blossom set off again, leaving me to trail behind her and wonder if I was going to follow her about all day.

The next set of dolls were so expressive. They had smiles and pouts that reminded me of real little girls. Orange Blossom wiggled her way into them, climbing over their feet and up their legs but she could not find a single Hitty.

"This is where the big dolls are kept." A doll with a friendly smile patted her on the head. "You should be on the other side of the museum.

"Thank you." Orange Blossom extracted herself from the big dolls and rejoined me on the other side of the rope. "Not here." 

They weren't in the next doll carriage we came to either, even though it was on the other side of the museum. We did find a smaller doll but much to Orange Blossom's dismay it wasn't small enough to be a Hitty.

"Some of these dolls are creepy." Orange Blossom gave the dolls sitting behind a sign declaring them to be 'drink and wet' dolls a wide berth. I trudge along behind her. 

I really wasn't sure I wanted to find any Hitty dolls. What if they weren't friendly?

Orange Blossom grabbed my hand and pulled me into a very large baby bed full of dolls that were much to big to be Hitty dolls. I can't really say they were friendly. We got a few unwelcoming faces but no one spoke to us. They didn't even move. They just laid there like they were sleeping even though at least half of them were definitely awake.

Orange Blossom crawled out of the bed leaving me to follow her or not. I took a moment longer to see if anyone would speak to me but they did not. 

The next doll was something called a plastic girl doll...what it was, I did not know... but Orange Blossom stayed far away from it too.  I thought she looked friendly but I had to choose between talking to her and keeping up with Orange Blossom. Orange Blossom won. When left to wonder it's best to dance with the doll that brought you.

We were surprised to find Merry among the Cabbage Patch Kid dolls, oohing and ahhing over them. 

"Wouldn't Bitsy just love these?" Merry looked up...and up...and up at one of the dolls. 

"I don't know." They gave me a crick in the neck just looking at them. "She's used to her Cabby being her size. To her these are giants." They were giants to me.

I couldn't believe how much bigger they were than Bitsy's. 

"Hey, look at this." Orange Blossom was standing on the corner of a shelf looking toward something I couldn't see. With great effort, I climbed over legs and dress tails until I could see what she was so enamored with. 

"She's missing a hand." Orange Blossom hissed.

"Yes. She is." It was a bit creepy to see but I reminded myself that my arms were not pigmented the same as my body. "Some dolls are just made different than others."

"I don't think she was made that way." Orange Blossom whispered. "Look at the rough edges. It looks like a dog got hold of her."

"Maybe one did. I've heard of Hitty's getting eaten by dogs." My pegs quaked just thinking about it. "We are supposedly a favorite chew toy for them."

"But no one puts chewed up Hitty's in a museum." Orange Blossom nodded at the poor doll, displayed right out in the walkway where you couldn't miss seeing her. "That poor thing looks like she might be blind too. I think she needs a doll hospital."

"I think she's just old, like this one..." 

"And this one." I climbed over a doll with a paper tag saying she was 'Thumbelina".

"Imagine all the things these dolls have seen in the years since they were made." I wondered what sort of wonderful things they had done.

"Mrs. Beazley is 50 years old, that's half a century." I couldn't even remember half a year ago.

"You girls stop looking at dumb old dolls and come ride the train." Hook yelled.

"Trains are much better than dolls." 

"Uh, Hook...you are a doll." Orange Blossom hid her smile behind her hand.

"Yeah, but I'm better than all these dolls. When are you girls going to be done in here? I'am tired of looking at a bunch of dolls. I've been through the room with the boy toys in three times already."

"Well, go through it again." I climbed up on a shelf that held small dolls that were donated to the museum according to a sign in front of them. They were neat and they were the right size but none of them were Hitty's. I shook my head at Orange Blossom and climbed back down again.

"No Hitty's over here either." Orange Blossom crawled out from in the midst of a group of dolls. 

"No, what's over here, honey?" A voice so thick with southern accent it sounded like  molasses drawled from somewhere in the midst of all those dolls.

"No Hitty's." Orange Blossom looked from one doll to the other as confused as I was about where the voice had come from.

"There's no kitty's in this museum, just us dolls. You will settle in soon enough. It's not exciting here like it was out in the world being played with by little girls but you'll never have to worry about getting lost again. Now go back to your spot and stay there until night falls. You know the rules, stay in your place until all the people stop coming then and only then can you venture out to visit. Now scoot."

Orange Blossom scooted. Right out of those dolls and fell into an RV.

"Hey, Isabella, look at this thing. Isn't it great?" She hung over the top of it. "There's a table and a steering wheel and even a bathroom in here. Let's take it home with us."

"I'd love to. Maybe Hook will drive it for us." I looked around for the boy in question but couldn't see him or Merry anywhere.

"On second thought..." Orange Blossom climbed out of the RV, "let's leave it here. It won't start."

"Maybe it only works at night." I shrugged, who knew what kind of rules the dolls and their things went by in this place. These dolls sure didn't seem to live the kind of life we did and I was beginning to wonder if there was a single Hitty in the whole place.

"Hey, look at this," Hook popped up in front of a group of boy dolls, one of which had his hair sticking straight up, "boys. I think I'll fix Justin's hair like that while he's sleeping."

"Just don't fix my face like this." Orange Blossom stumbled in her haste to back away from a group of dolls. "She's all white."

I joined her near the dolls and was surprised to see just how white one of them was.

"I may be a doll but some of these things are just creepy." Orange Blossom shuddered. "Will we look like this someday?"

"I," What could I say? Everywhere I looked there were old dolls, some neat, some scary, some...creepy, "don't know.

"I mean," Orange Blossom turned in a circle pointing out old dolls in various stages of eeriness, "they all had to be young once."

"Now some of them are even creepy old gramma dolls."

And they were. They didn't look like friendly grandma dolls but the kind of grandma dolls you might not want to visit lest they should try to gobble you up or something.

"Do you suppose this is where dolls go to die?" Orange Blossom's voice was so small I barely heard it.

"No. Of course not." Maybe. Possibly. Probably.

"You sure?"

"Uhh..." No. How was I supposed to know? Some of these dolls certainly looked past their prime but how long did a doll's prime last and how much past their prime could they keep going? Some of the oldest dolls looked like babies and some of the younger ones looked old. It was the nature of dolls I suppose.

"Look here!" I ran over to a glass case holding dolls our size. "Little dolls."

"Lots of little dolls." I searched the faces looking back at me, eager now to find the Hitty's. Anything was better than talking about dolls dying. But there were no Hitty's in the case.

"I don't see any Hitty's." Orange Blossom peered into the case, looking as hard as I was.

"Me either." But I also didn't see any creepy dolls and Orange Blossom seemed to have forgotten her peg worrying observations and questions.

"We came all this way to go to a doll museum and they don't even have a Hitty."

"No, but they have lots of other wonderful dolls and all the dolls have stories to tell. Just think of the wonderful things they could share with us if we could stay the night and hear their tales of when they lived in the outside world like us. Some of these dolls even lived when people traveled by covered wagons. I sure wish I could hear their stories."