It stood in our nursery bookshelf for many years and after I outgrew that age I forgot all about it.
Perhaps one of my sisters has kept it. I will have to ask them.
A few weeks ago I browsed on Etsy, the site I love for many of my vintage research explores and guess what I found? Exactly! The very book!
It immediately brought me back, more then forty five years, into a small bedroom in Dresden.
Out of all places, it was sold by a kind woman in Norway, who maintains a small Etsy shop, devoted to vintage books mainly in Russian and German.
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| At the doll doctor's |
With a strangely moving feeling memories began to trickle back.
I bought the book and as I held it between my hands a few days later I suddenly remembered days, many years back, spend in the small bedroom my sister and I shared.
We would re-enact the story line, taking dolls and teddy bears to the doll doctor, one of us being the doctor, the other the concerned mother of a sick doll child. I could see the light in the bedroom, the pushed together chairs to create the sick ward. A small doctor kit, complete with thermometer, bandages and creams, which must have been given to one of us for Christmas perhaps, played a major role in getting the patients healthy again.
A distinct scent lingers in the back of my memory, the scent of shea butter from the tiny tins, filled with the delicious smelling concoction.
The curtain of time comes down again, dimming the stage lights of my memories, but for a moment the book brings back these childhood days and it fills me with happiness.
Image my own.
