Letting go of Golliwog

I may have overdone it a smidgen today: a good 3 hours of yard work this morning, then a 45 minute bike ride and a 5 km walk after work. That will teach me to skip swimming because I know I have ballet, and then forget what time ballet class started.

Tonight I threw out a thing that was hard to give up. It was a golliwog doll knitted for me by my great-grandmother. It was about 50 years old and completely inappropriate for today. It had probably been patterned after Golliwog from the Enid Blyton Noddy stories. I never really liked those stories, finding them a bit mean and unpleasant even as a child. Still, I loved Golliwog because it had been made with love just for me, even though it usually lay under the bed and didn’t get so much as a glance from one month to the next. Yesterday, though, I noticed that the red and green stitches that defined its clothes had rotted away in places and the stuffing was coming out. I seriously considered trying to knit it back together, but finally decided it was time to let it go. I looked for a suitable image to accompany this post but the pictures of all those golliwog dolls was disturbing. Instead, here is a picture of the Museum of African-American History in Washington DC, which I had the privilege of visiting last year.



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