A Child in Isolation and How A Mystery Made it Easier

My ears still hurt from wearing earrings I wear all day on Halloween. The metal finding is cheap and makes my skin black around the piercing, but the black spiderweb and silver tarantula make me smile. It’s worth the suffering. 

During the rest of the year the earrings rest in an antique porcelain box that once sat on the table where my mother stood her magnifying mirror and pull tweezers from the drawer to shape her eyebrows. It was hers, but given that it was likely made before she was born, it may have belonged to someone else, but I never asked. The box holds my treasures now, though most the same monetary value as the plastic earrings, a resin vampire pin, a puzzle-piece Christmas tree my son made with safety pins glued to the back, a coin pressed at Greenfield Village, another in the Caribbean, and a teddy-bear barrette that felt like velvet when I wore it with the Easter dress the first year I rode a two-wheeler; the flocking now worn away but the pink eyes remain as bright as I remember.

While sorting through the box for the spiderwebs, I noticed envelopes trapped in the lid of the box, the kind attached to coats or dresses with extra buttons. Two had buttons as marked, and one held a tiny china dog. I don’t remember putting it there, but I do remember the dog, a good replica of beagle brown and long flopped black ears, and how it sat atop a mirror on a bookshelf, with beagles in other poses, and other breeds of dogs and many other tiny bone China animals that eventually filled three shelves.

 

I don’t remember how my collection started. I believe there was a cocker spaniel that was my mother's and, maybe a couple other dogs belonged to my sister until she lost interest in them as a teenager. My memory is hazy on that part, but I remember amassing money I made from extra chores and gifts to ride my bike to the Village, the shopping district, to a gift store where they had a display of what seemed like hundreds of bone China animals. I bought other beagles that made a family for the one in the envelope. I bought a Siamese kitty that lapped milk from a separate pale of spilt milk- a cost of two animals, plus it’s mother with a fragile serpentine tail, that miraculously never broke. I remember buying a frog, a hippo, mother and calf elephants, brown, black and white cows, pigs with a momma and two babies, a skunk that held onto a separate tree-the cost of two animals, a squirrel the very same body as the skunk that reached out to a separate tree trunk, chipmunks, a ewe with two white and one black lamb- a little like me, a deer family, chickens, roosters, and horses of different breeds and coloring.

 

Farm animals were separated from the domestics, neighborhood wildlife from the wild animals. Word got around the family of my collection, and, like Beanie Boos and Beanie Babies now were a pretty much guaranteed hit as a gift. I admit that I was disappointed when they showed up in glass, or carved stone. I liked the smooth shiny bone china, others would be found on the lower shelves.

 

On the fourth to last day of third grade, when my collection of animals easily fit on a single mirrored tray on top of my dresser, I was diagnosed with an illness that meant I had to stay in a darkened room until my blood tests were normal… weeks, the doctor told my mother. And, I was contagious. No Field Day at school or final good byes, no biking, no swimming, no hide and seek on the block, nor visits from friends. Except for weekly trips to the doctor to draw blood to monitor the illness, I wasn’t allowed out. Since light was an issue, I was relegated to the basement where we had a tv and my bed room. 

 

Luckily, I was a reader. Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, and the buccaneers of Treasure Island kept me company, as well as Annette, Jimmy, Cubby and Bobby of the Mickey Mouse Club, Beaver, Kathy Anderson on Father Knows Best, and Soupy Sales, White Fang and Blacktooth on tv. It’s funny, I don’t remember being frustrated or bored or lonely or scared. I don’t remember getting special attention, but I likely did... someone went to the library to get me the books, and someone brought me Faygo Rock and Rye. 

 

I was five when we moved to that Cape Cod house. My siblings each had a room upstairs, my bedroom was on the first floor along with my parent’s. I remember the heavy book of wallpaper samples, larger than any photo album, that my mother brought home to pick out wallpaper. I chose black and white puppies with a green background, the other choice I had, was a pink background. My mother hung lined curtains to match.

 

One window of my room faced south toward downtown Detroit, and the other, west toward the next-door neighbors. No fence in between, only a few box shrubs and lawn on our property, and the neighbor’s wide driveway. In the mornings that summer, I was allowed to open my curtains to let in the west light but had to close them before noon when the sun peeked in. One morning, when I drew back the curtains a grey wolf sat, ready to howl on the window ledge. No box nor note. He was different from every one that I had. They were shiny and smooth. The wolf’s coat was rough and matte. No one fessed up to giving me the wolf. And Though I was learning great detective skills in the books I was reading, I could Barely leave my room, let alone the house to Interrogate my suspects.

 

Three days later a collie, standing majestic like Lassie, stood on my window ledge,  then a German Shepherd. Every eight or ten days over the course of June, July and August more animals appeared. A couple had little nicks, as though someone else may have owned them.

 

It became so much easier to go to sleep at night in hopes I have a surprise. You want to know who orchestrated this multi week campaign of China animals? So do I, I never found out. That window was always open, though the curtains drawn from noon to dawn, it was summer and we didn’t have air-conditioning, but I never heard a sound. They stopped appearing once I received an all clear from Doctor Kennary. Even once I was able to ask people face-to-face no one confessed. I suspect it was my next-door neighbors who’s kitchen faced my bedroom window but, they never let on.

  

In this time of Covid and thinking about people who are sick, I’m reminded of the kindness that someone bestowed on me to make my life easier, and never let on.