Tag: grandmother/granddaughter

A Doll for Christmas

1 December 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Melanie Harless

As I search online for a Christmas doll for my five-year-old granddaughter, I am astounded at how things have changed since I was her age. There are so many choices. There are the baby dolls that don’t really do anything special and then there are the ones that, thanks to modern technology, seem almost alive. One giggles and plays peek-a-boo, another speaks two languages, and one even “eats” and “poops.” The most fantastic of all is a doll that engages in two-way communication, sees and hears, and expresses real emotions! Of course, I can always get one of those fashion-type dolls that look like miniature teenagers, but won’t that make her want to grow up too soon?

My mind drifts back to my first Christmas doll when I was about my granddaughter’s age. Santa Claus came to our house early on Christmas Eve while we were next door at my granny’s house for a Christmas Eve supper. When we got home, I could not believe all that Santa had brought me. There were lots of toys, but what caught my eye was the beautiful doll lying in a baby buggy. She was just what I had asked Santa to bring.

On Christmas night, I put my new doll down to sleep in her buggy and my family went back to Granny’s for Christmas dinner with all the relatives. Then chaos erupted. I never really knew for sure if the Christmas tree had caught fire or if something else caused our little house to go up in flames and burn to the ground taking my pretty doll with it.

I was upset about losing my new doll at first, but I guess I had not had it long enough to grow too attached. A few weeks late my mother made me a sock doll with blue button eyes, a red button nose, and a permanent red stitched smile on her face. It was not beautiful like my Christmas doll had been, but it was soft and huggable. I carried it everywhere and slept with it every night.

When I was six or seven, I received a Sweet Sue doll for Christmas with a complete layette that my mother had sat up late many nights sewing while the rest of the family slept. Sweet Sue, a 24-inch walking doll made of hard plastic, was the latest in doll technology at the time. She had beautiful blue eyes that opened and closed, long eyelashes, and curly auburn hair. As I held her hand, she walked beside me and turned her head from side to side.

I had never seen anything like her and played with her for many years, even after my brother knocked her head off a few months after Christmas. A metal post inside connected her head to her legs and after her head was knocked off she could no longer walk properly but the post kept her head on her neck in a cute tilt that looked as if she were looking up at me when she was sitting. It made it easier to dress her. I just lifted her head off!

For my ninth Christmas, my parents decided I should have a doll that wasn’t broken, and so I found under the tree a doll that took a bottle and wet. Along with it was a beautiful blue baby carriage. It was similar to the doll and carriage that had burned in the fire many years before. That same year, my new baby cousin was born right before Christmas and came to our house to stay while my aunt got her strength back. I had a real live baby to play with. I didn’t need dolls anymore.

I put the new doll and her carriage in my closet along with my broken Sweet Sue and the now raggedy sock doll. Occasionally, I took them out and played with them, trying to recapture feelings they had brought me, but only the beat-up old sock doll that my mother had made still made me smile.

After mulling over my doll history, I try again to choose a doll for my granddaughter. Would she be overwhelmed with a doll that can do almost everything or thrilled like I had been with that Sweet Sue walker? Would she rather have a baby doll with a carriage or a Barbie doll like so many little girls these days? Which doll would make her smile long after Christmas was over?

Then I knew the answer! I leave the online store and begin a new search—how to make a sock doll.

Melanie Harless began writing after retirement as a school librarian in 2006. She is an award-winning writer with poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography published in anthologies, journals, and magazines. She is a board member of Tennessee Mountain Writers and leads excursions for the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning.

Marie’s Wings

14 October 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

“I want to fly,” my four-year-old granddaughter, Marie, says. “Me too,” I say. We’re watching a My Little Pony video. Some of the ponies fly. Her favorite is Rainbow Dash, a blue Pegasus with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. The pony’s wings are small, but Rainbow Dash can fly fast. Marie loves fast.

She also loves other real or imagined creatures with wings: birds, butterflies, and fairies. Marie is mesmerized by red-breasted robins or blue-bodied stellar’s jays as they flutter from tree to tree in my forest home. I watch as Marie runs beneath them clapping her hands, saying, “fly, fly.” Marie is also fascinated by the butterflies that hover over our lilac and rosemary bushes. She has a little green butterfly net, and occasionally she will capture one. Because of her autism, she’s speech delayed, but she makes happy sounds in her own language. She gently brushes her finger across one of the wings. I notice how the light catches the wings, creating a sparkling shimmer. After inspecting the butterfly, we find a place to re-home it in the large half-barrel filled with lavender, lemon balm, and thyme.

Later, on a trip to Mount Shasta, I find a little store that sells children’s red monarch butterfly wings made of a soft, light fabric. The winged cape has straps around the shoulders and loops around the wrists, allowing Marie to open and close the wings, her movements mimicking a butterfly. Back at my home, she dashes through the yard flapping her arms. “I’m flying, I’m flying,” she says. For a while, those wings are her favorite accessory. She wears her bright red cape everywhere we go.

Less than a year after I buy the wings, they are destroyed in the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, along with her other cherished toys. In the years that follow the fire, Marie brings three grocery bags filled with her new special toys anytime she leaves home. She fears losing the things she loves, the purple dragon she had saved from the fire, her new little ponies, her fox, and kitten plushies.

Marie just turned twelve. She now has a good vocabulary with her own unique communication style, but talking about emotions is difficult. We don’t talk about the fire or the loss of her former home. But I know she’s had some healing. She no longer needs to bring three bags of toys when she visits, but the purple dragon always travels with her. And she still has the butterfly net.

On her latest visit, she captures a tiny, lustrous green frog. Marie tenderly holds it in her hand, while we walk it over to the half-barrel of herbs where she sets it free. Afterwards, she runs off with her net searching for butterflies through the soft spring grasses and up in the branches of the flowering apple trees. As I watch her run, I think about the traumas she’s faced at such a young age—the fire, numerous moves, COVID, and missed school years. The losses have been difficult, but like the butterflies, Marie soars. “Fly, Fly,” I say.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer who lives in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Meadow, The Raven’s Perch, and many other literary journals and print anthologies. Learn more about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

Jam Cakes

27 December 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lo Riddell

Here comes nature’s peace
offering: pale landscapes

with feather-brush forests
licking the first snowflakes

straight from the sky.
Invisible sun shines through

shadow-bellied clouds, turning
blue skies white with promise

of more snow. My grandmother
alchemizes the last of her summer

blackberries into cakes that fit
kindly in my open hands.

Dusk comes early once again,
creeping in through kitchen windows

to steal a piece of fresh-baked bread
from the stovetop. The holly berries

light up the roadside like string lights
for families of deer trotting by.

At last, December takes her stage
and exhales the passing year.

Lo Riddell is a lesbian writer from southern Ohio, currently based in New England. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in 2022, and now spends her free time writing poetry, prose, and essays on pop culture. You can find her on Instagram at @vintagelouisa.

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

Let’s Fly Away

30 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Martha Ellen Johnson

“Grammy, let’s fly away.”
We are sitting on the top
step of the second floor
staircase. Down the hall
is her magical kingdom
bedroom. She’s wearing
fairy wings over her street
clothes as usual, a sign of
a theatrical life to bloom
in later years. “I can’t. I
don’t have any wings,” I said.
“Hold my hand. We can fly
together.” And I do. We
fly down the hall soaring
into another realm hovering
far above the ordinary, held
aloft by the imagination
of the most innocent.

Martha Ellen Johnson lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. Old hippie. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her wild life.

Maternal Fabric

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

The Christmas before she died, my mother gave seven-year-old Gwyn a mint-green Hello Kitty sewing machine. Believe it or not it’s a decent machine, she said, despite its small size and ridiculous color. The two of them spent the week making Gwyn’s first patchwork pillow, my mother’s gray chemo curls mingling with Gwyn’s untamed ginger. Gwyn took to sewing as I never had. Afterward I told myself if my mother were to die tomorrow, at least this happened, at least grandmother and grandchild shared days of fingering fabric and winding thread and loving what they both love.

She died that May. And one month later we needed fabric for Gwyn to sew pillow cases as a wedding present for her birth mom. Time was short so I took her to a tiny store just a mile north, a store we’d never been in because the faded mural of a quilt chipping off the exterior made me assume it would be filled with quilt kits and the cheap fabric my mother scorned. As soon as we walked in I knew otherwise. The shelves were saturated with color: bolts in batik, Japanese indigo, elegant floral cotton. It was my mother’s dream store. While Gwyn pranced between shelves I stood in the doorway, aching for my mother. Gwyn discovered the enormous bank of thread and pulled me over: “Look, Mama!” A tidy, exuberant rainbow, and she adored every spool. Gwyn’s delight soothed my sorrow. At least she’ll carry forward my mother’s sewing legacy.

Then, from the thousands of lovely artisan cloths, Gwyn chose a cutsie retro kitten print. In red, teal, and baby blue. My mother in me reared up—no, no, no! Wide-eyed cats pawing balls of yarn were the epitome of kitsch—beneath us, somehow. With every other fabric in this store Gwyn could make something beautiful. Except that Gwyn and her birth mom love cats. Gwyn was the seamstress. She knew what she wanted.

The fabric was perfect.

And just as suddenly I was grateful my mom was gone. She would have held sway in the name of good taste and reputation. For decades I’ve heard her voice in my head, sometimes heeding it, sometimes rebelling, but now her voice is disembodied. She’s dead. She’ll never see the pillowcases, which are adorable and of which Gwyn is terrifically proud. Her birth mom rests her head nightly on Gwyn’s love. The woman at the counter thumped the fabric from the bolt and snipped with long, black-handled scissors, cutting for us both a measure of freedom.

Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is a wisdom teacher and writing coach dedicated to facilitating creative emergence. As a writer she elicits the spirit’s movement within stories; as a teacher she supports transformation within writers and on the page. You can connect with Elizabeth at www.spiritualmemoir.com and www.elizabethjarrettandrew.com.

Tag: grandmother/granddaughter

A Doll for Christmas

Marie’s Wings

Jam Cakes

Let’s Fly Away

Maternal Fabric

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