This Day
This Day The doll was still, but peace and happiness radiated from her face. She was only paper, a paper-mâché doll, 10 inches high on her wooden pedestal, holding a bundle...or child...with her left arm, the right open and propelling her forward as she contemplated stepping off the block she was glued to, into the room where she'd lived these many years. She was Korean, artist-made, but certainly American now after 20 years of bringing calm to that room. She wasn't alone of course, never alone. There were pictures, plants, other living things, and more tiny crawling creatures than she was ready to shelter, but happily none of them feasted on paper. Her gift was observation. The plants brought respiration into the room, the computer hummed sound, the pens--and sometimes a pencil--scratched on paper; the four wooden birds kept watch and the photographs--4 generations of babies, boys and girls, women and men, none of them...
