The Good Things Together ladies who make Mother Bears, tagged me today because I didn’t post any bears in the first January showcase. I have a full box of bears to send and two or three bears in various stages of completion. I should get on with those.

But I just had a brilliant idea—

because, you know, I am struggling in the doll world. I had to turn down friend requests from doll ladies, because they aren’t really my people.

And like on one doll list someone is making these really fabulous dolls. But…ballerinas for girls and ninjas for boys. What about the girls who want to be ninjas? what about the boys who want a ballerina/bailerinx?

And then I realized I can name all of my 2018 bears after the murdered trans & qoc folks! Like a testament, a bearing witness, in another setting.

I already got one post banned for being political: saying I didn’t buy at hobby lobby for political reasons and then someone posted back that it’s not that they don’t allow employees birth control but only don’t allow abortion pill. (Medication abortion, “Abortion pill” is the popular name for using two different medicines to end a pregnancy: mifepristone and misoprostol, formerly known as RU-486.

The mods shut that discussion down. In fact, I had gone back to delete my post and they had already deleted it.

Oh, I remember seeing stores that sold dolls of color. I can’t remember if it was near Joanie’s place in the excelsior, or in Denver. It appears (in both of these places) in my dreams. I never got to go in because it was always closed.

So, as a a little girl, I was absolutely obsessed with dolls. It was a joke that if my dad gave me a dollar at the swap meet, I’d spend it on a doll immediately. And at one time, I was sewing clothes for barbies (mostly these wrap-around jumper numbers that were super short and showed a lot of side-boob), until I sewed through my thumbnail, which put me of machine sewing for a long, long time.

And one time in the seventies “corn husk dolls” became a popular kitchen decoration. And that’s when I was making them out of kleenex and cotton balls and thread, and Aunt Alice told my mom I needed to learn to knit so I could do something with all of that.