A Doll's House by Jody Casella

My dream gift when I was a little girl was a dollhouse.

I had a vision of it: A house made of wood-- not flimsy plastic like my Barbie camper--  but something finer. With multiple rooms. A winding staircase. Carpets on the wooden floors. Curtains hanging in the windows. Blankets folded on the beds. 

All shrunken down, of course, to fit dolls smaller than my statuesque, matted-haired barbies and headless Ken. 

Small was the key. I loved the idea of the tiny furniture. Teeny drawers with things hidden inside. Miniature table settings on the table. I had read the Borrowers series and liked to imagine tiny people living inside my walls, sneaking out at night to swipe a dropped pea for their dinner.  

When I turned nine, I was given a dollhouse by my mother and stepfather. It was your basic design. The back wall missing. Four rooms. A roof that folded back to reveal an attic. It wasn't finished yet--still unpainted, the wood bare--and unfurnished, which disappointed me. Plus, I was nine years old, and thinking of myself as past the dollhouse phase.

I didn't want to show my disappointment to my mother though. Over the next few months she painted the house. She wallpapered the rooms. She sewed curtains. She bought furniture. My best friend, who made it clear that she was also too old to play with dollhouses, came over to look at it. 

All finished and not much to do with it, and that seemed to be the end of that for the dollhouse.

But then we discovered something interesting in our neighborhood. In the window of one of the houses, was a dollhouse. Bigger and more elaborate than mine. My friend and I were intrigued and confused. We didn't think a little girl lived in that house, so who the heck was playing with the dollhouse?

One day my friend marched up the front walk and rang the doorbell. An old lady poked her head out and who knows what she was thinking at the sight of two strange nine year olds on her front porch. "We want to look at your dollhouse," my friend said.

The lady, oddly enough, invited us inside. This dollhouse was my vision come to life. Three stories. With multiple rooms and a winding staircase. A back wall that hinged. Shingles on the roof. Lights that you could switch on and off. Carpets and drapery.

My friend and I stood in awe as the woman opened a dresser drawer with tweezers. Inside were small items tucked away and folded. Clothing and towels. She lifted a book from a bookshelf. The pages had teeny words on the pages. And in the kitchen there was food pretend-burbling in a pot on the stove.

"Those are beads," the woman told us. Teeny green ones to look like peas. She confided other secrets. How you could cut pictures from magazines to make art to hang on the walls. Use scraps of fabric for the bedding.

My friend and I raced back to my house to get to work. My dollhouse wasn't a toy, we realized, it was a project. The game was to create the things to arrange inside. We played with the dollhouse for the next few years, long long after we should've been too old to play with dollhouses.

I have the house still. It's pushed in the back of my closet and nowhere near as amazing as I remember it being. Layered with dust. Some of the furniture broken or missing pieces.

But when I open a drawer, I find a bit of cloth, folded and tucked away. Forgotten by my nine year old, ten year old, eleven year old self. 

A small gift to me today of friendship and joy and play.