Ella is home and trying to decide whether to lug her smelly suitcase directly over to our temporary storage room, rather than let it stink up the apartment—which requires a little backstory, I realize:

The kids came over for our annual Christmas celebration on the Sunday before Christmas because Ella was flying to San Diego the next day to spend Christmas with her brother. After we emptied stockings and opened presents, Emma made the candle above and Arielle made a pair of… Oh, but that’s not far enough back.

Arielle had arrived on Thursday from Chicago, but decorating the tree together didn’t go according to plan. Only days before, our neighbor, Gina, had announced… Naw, that’s not far enough back either.

The exterminators finally arrived to set rat traps around the outside of our temporary storage room—five weeks after we reported to the management that the rodents were nesting in our Christmas stockings. Then when our neighbor, Gina, visited the storage room after the belated intervention, she reported back that it stank to high heaven. It turned out that a desiccated member of the rat clan was rotting in there. So Ella rescued our tree ornaments and Christmas candles from the smell and brought them back to the apartment. But at the time, she didn’t think to rescue her suitcase.

Days later Arielle arrived from Chicago and announced she’d been accepted to the University of Chicago law school(!) So, to celebrate when she came over—since we didn’t have any champagne—I spiked some eggnog with Fra Angelico liqueur and we toasted to her brilliant career as a lawyer. But when we went to decorate the tree, the tinsel we pulled out of the bag smelled of rat pee. So did the lights. So the three of us headed out into the night to find replacements. We went to a CVS, then a Walgreen’s, that were sold out of tree trimmings, but, as they say, the third time is the…well, you know. The CVS in El Cerrito Plaza had everything we needed. And since we were there anyway, we went over to Barnes and Noble and bought a 1,000-piece puzzle.

Then, when we got home and tried to play our favorite Christmas albums on our boom box while we did the decorating, I couldn’t turn up the volume on Andrea Bocelli’s My Christmas album loud enough for it to sound like more than a murmur, signaling that the boom box was kaput. Fortunately, we were able to stream—on my iMac—not only Josh Grobin’s wonderful duet with Brian McKnight of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” but opera singer Kathleen Battle’s entire A Christmas Celebration album from 1990, which Leia had given me as a cassette when we first became friends—and which became part of my Christmas tradition with the kids after they were born until it wore out.

Anyway, once the tree was resplendent and glittering that Thursday evening, Arielle, Ella, and I worked on our puzzle late into the night.

Now Ella is showing me gifts from her relatives in southern California: among them a wooden foot massager with bumpy spools that turn when you roll your foot over them, a burgundy-colored cardigan that she tries on, and maracuja (passion fruit) jam and herbal tea from her brother Brian. (And here I should probably explain that Ella lived in Bahia, Brazil, from age ten to fourteen. Her father, a geologist, was hired by the oil company Petrobras.)

Next she shows me a coffee table book, also from Brian, called Gordon Parks – The Flavio Story. Parks was an African American photographer who went to a Rio favela (slum) in 1961 to take pictures for Life magazine of the conditions there—and followed a boy named Flavio, she tells me. The slum was called Catacumba—catacomb—which says it all.

And what am I feeling as I study the pictures? A pang of guilt about the money I’ve spent on my doll collection over the years, while boys like Flavio are still wasting away from malnutrition in the slums of Rio.

One Christmas I decided to buy myself an 8-inch Madame Alexander Wendy doll. I’d been eyeing a display of them for years at Mr. Mopps’ toy store. But they’re collectors’ dolls—for me, an extravagance, I’d told myself.

In A Patchwork Memoir, I wrote:

The day I bought my first Madame Alexander doll—I still haven’t managed to convince myself I deserve the second—I stared at her face off and on all afternoon, I found it so beautiful. When I took off her clothes, I discovered, to my delight, that she had dimpled elbows and knees. I actually felt a pang of tenderness for her, as if she were a real child.

Curious about her reaction, I decided to show her to Arielle. If she liked my new doll, I thought calculatingly, it would give me an excuse to buy the other one—with the altruistic intention of eventually giving her to Arielle…er…when she’s old enough to take good care of her. (Her wig wouldn’t last five minutes, the way Arielle swings her dolls around by the hair, I rationalized. As for her dress… Well, let me just say that the other day Arielle pulled something out of a plastic basket full of Barbie dolls and clothes and asked, “What’s this?” All I could see was that it was roundish, gray-brown, and fuzzy—I thought it must be a wad of some kind of wooly fabric. It wasn’t until I put on my glasses that I recognized what it was—a withered orange, blanketed entirely by thick gray mold.)

Another evening I fetched my old Muffy’s doll clothes from the basement—the ones I used to play with with Kathy—thinking they would fit my new doll, only to find that she was slightly too tall and wide in girth. OK, I’ll make her clothes myself, I resolved. But when I went to The Cotton Patch the next afternoon, I got more and more discouraged as I perused shelf after shelf of cotton prints, none of which I liked. After an hour of scrutiny, I left with only two swatches, one checked and one striped; all the floral prints were in grayed “country” colors that don’t particularly appeal to me. What’s wrong with me? I thought, appalled to realize my aesthetic was—apparently—so narrow.

But this morning at Beverly’s Fabrics in Alameda I got light-headed, I found so many flowered prints—bright and pastel—in the clear colors I love. I actually set foot in the store at 2:00 in the afternoon and didn’t stagger out until after 5:00, with a receipt a foot and a half long! This evening I’ve been trying the trims I picked out with the various fabrics and can already see in my mind’s eye half a dozen outfits and costumes I’m itching to make.

Why did I buy this particular doll? you may be wondering. Because I couldn’t resist the hat. Strangely, I later saw in a Madame Alexander catalogue that the hat in the photograph was on backwards. Whoever dressed her for the shoot hadn’t realized that the lace on these old-fashioned bonnets was meant to frame the face.

And, by the way, I did eventually buy the other doll I coveted—a blond frog princess.