Under My Tree

In front of my city house is a square tree planter, with a redbud tree, I often find things left under my tree even when it’s not Christmas. Generally those things are cigarette butts, half-empty cans and bottles because apparently anything even vaguely resembling an open container is a good place for trash. I suppose I should be grateful they’re not just throwing it all over the street, but I’m not. It’s annoying and one of the things I dislike about city living.

Last week on my way out the door I saw something unusual under my tree; a doll. The doll itself, broken and missing a hand wasn’t creepy (though seeing it there looking at me was, a little). It was trash day, so whoever left her there could have easily put her onto one of the many bags of garbage lining both sides of the street, rather than  under my tree.

The little girl in a stroller drops the doll out. Her attention is caught by the juice box her mom offers her, and neither of them notices the doll’s fall. When they get home the girl is sleepy, so her mom puts her down for a nap. Hours pass before they notice the doll is gone. The little girl may cry and demand the doll be given to her or she may be easily distracted. Her mom has no idea where they lost her as they were running their errands. They lose things all the time.

I see an elderly woman living on a nearby street. She dies, leaving her middle aged children to clean out her house. They’re a little resentful of all the stuff she has accumulated over 55 years of living in the same house. They had been trying to get her to go through it for the past four years, but she couldn’t do it; it made her too sad. This broken doll was not one of her favorites, but she kept it because it had been a gift from a former student. Her youngest son said he would take her to his daughter, but when he got her out of the dark house and into the daylight he saw she was broken. He left her by my tree because although he didn’t want her, he couldn’t bring himself to leave her with the trash.

The woman who left it there got the doll as a gift from her boyfriend. He won her last summer at the county fair. It was the sweetest time they had spent together. He just broke up with her using the lame excuse that it was him and not her, but a mutual friend has confirmed what she suspected; he went back to his ex-wife. He, not she lives on my street. She has been leaving his gifts to her all over the neighborhood hoping he will see them, and feel just a fraction of the pain she is feeling. He hasn’t noticed any of them.

There are an infinite possible number of ways the doll could have made her way to my tree. None of them have anything to do with me, or my tree. I will never know, and since the doll meant nothing to me, other than an enigma I will never solve, I did add it to the bags of trash along my street.

When one of the trash collectors saw it, he thought it was pretty and decided to keep it. He restores old dolls, and has a collection. He doesn’t have anything like this one, and he feels lucky to have come across her today. His entire collection has come from the streets of Philadelphia, and he does the painstaking work of repairing them as a way to separate himself from his tedious days of collecting other people’s garbage.

That is what I imagine about the doll left under my tree.