Lost

Lost my dolly, don’t know where.
She’s got no clothes and got no hair.
She’s somewhere out there lost and bare,
thinking that I do not care.
I’d go out looking, but don’t dare.

That babysitter over there
(My mother calls her our au pair)
came by foot and ship and air
from a country named Zaire
to sit here on her derriere
and watch me with her icy stare.

I open up our Frigidaire. 
Could my dolly be in there?
I climb up on a bedroom chair
and go through Mommy’s underwear.
I do not think that she would care.
I find my brother’s whistle there,
hidden in that lacy lair,
and think it really isn’t fair.
It’s every mother’s cruel nightmare.
My dolly isn’t anywhere!

I had to stop the car to take this photo. I wish I knew the true story behind it. I can’t imagine any little girl throwing out her doll, and the lot was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Someone must have tossed it in there. A mean boy? A jealous brother? Was it unwanted loot from a burglary? My mom and I once rode all the way back out to the dump from town to retrieve a doll’s head we’d thrown away. All the way home, we’d both been thinking about it, sitting there amidst coffee grounds and broken light bulbs. We had pulled into the garage when my mom turned to look at me and said, “Do you want to go back out and get that doll’s head?” I nodded. We did, and I have that head to this very day. If my mom had been with me, one or the other of us would have gotten through that barbed wire somehow. As it is, this image is the only part of the doll that I was able to rescue.