Now I must go and build the fire in the bedroom and wash my late dinner dishes and do all the little things to make the evening comfortable. – Ina Dobson, 1936
Since
they had not done laundry on Monday, they didn’t need to iron on Tuesday – a win-win,
as we say. It was a warmer day, so Ina went out to plant some leftover iris
bulbs. Maybe they wouldn’t take, but she wasn’t too concerned. It was just good
to get out of the house and into the fresh air. It did her a world of good.
In the afternoon, Ina and Shirley stuffed the doll with fabric bits. The instructions said that the head should be stuffed firmly and the body less firmly, so Ina stuffed the head – and she stuffed and she stuffed – and the body not quite so much. I think there’s an art to stuffing a toy, which probably comes from practice, and Ina just didn’t make so many dolls that she felt confident in this art. But anyway, she tried. Shirley had good luck stuffing the arms and legs, and then she returned to embroidering the dress protectors she was making as Christmas gifts.
The
wig was finally finished, but when Ina tried it on the doll’s stuffed head, it
didn’t fit! It didn’t fit at all! It took Shirley to realize the difficulty. “Mama,
she has a pointed head. You need to remove some of the stuffing.”
And
then the two of them laughed until tears ran down their cheeks, seeing that it was really obvious that the doll’s
head was too big for her body. They were still chuckling and wiping their eyes when Jack came in for a cup of coffee. He decided not to ask what was so funny. He knew from experience that he might not think it was so funny.
Anyway, the fix was fairly easy. The head had been stuffed through the body, so Ina
removed all the stuffing from the body and then began to pull stuffing from the
head and rearrange it. What a mess of little fabric bits on the table, but the problem
was soon corrected and the wig fit just fine.
And
now it was time to do all the little things that made the evening comfortable –
stoking the fires, lighting the lamps, etc.
3 comments:
I love the idea of "doing all the things to make the evening comfortable." It's true, I always feel so much more relaxed and ready to enjoy the evening when I get the kitchen squared away after supper. Right now our gas fireplace is blazing away and it feels very comfortable in here. Hope you are enjoying a like evening!
Was there some real-time truth to this installment or is it 100 percent fiction?
There was some real-time truth in that I made the doll and stuffed her head too much. And of course, Ina did prepare her home for the evening as daylight began to wane.
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