Rosemary
I was ten years old and my mother felt I was too old to keep getting dolls as presents. I didn’t agree with her at all. Her idea just made her last doll gift to me all the more precious. It was so beautiful; she was almost like a real baby. She had short curly red hair. Her arms were just like skin, soft and malleable. Her little fingers squeezed mine, I’m sure of it. She’d look at me with those big blue eyes that opened and shut when I tilted her head, and her long lashes went up and down. I called her “Rosemary’. You could say I loved Rosemary. Very much. In my world of aloneness, she was the receiver of my affections. She was so cuddly.
I lost Rosemary when we moved home from France when I was eleven. My memory is vague as to the exact time, but I know I was longing for her.
It was many years later at the family cottage, that my aunt mentioned she had seen Rosemary at the bottom of the lake. I was horrified. But I figured that my cousins, who were young at that time, and mischievous, had taken her from me to play a joke and just pitched her in the lake.
I grieved my Rosemary for years. Somehow, knowing where she was offered closure and I lived on with the fond memory of her. I have tried many times to replace her, but I don’t think they make them like that any more.
