Back in the mid-1970s, I worked as a librarian and Spanish teacher at a juvenile detention facility – that’s a sanitized phrase for a prison. It was supposed to be a place for male juvenile offenders, but we had a lot of men who were well beyond juvenile. I spent three years there, setting up the library, getting it functional. By my last year, I was beginning to feel like an inmate and was eager to get out.
During the Christmas holidays of what would be my last year there, I went shopping for a special gift for my mother. There was an art store in downtown Vero Beach that sold original Edna Hibel paintings, lithographs and figurines. My mother loved Hibel’s art in every form. She collected the figurines – many of them mother/daughter motifs so perfectly sculpted they captured the essence of that particular relationship. But on a back wall, I found an artist proof of a little Dutch girl that captured me.
It was well beyond what I could afford, so I called my dad and asked if he would split it with me. He did, of course, and on Christmas morning, my mother opened her gift, her eyes wide with astonishment. The little Dutch graced the living room wall in my parents’ home for many years. She witnessed disputes and triumphs, a flood, hurricanes, weddings. When Rob and I got married in my parents’ living room, the little Dutch girl gazed down serenely. When our first novels were published, she celebrated with us. She witnessed my mother’s descent into the black hole of Alzheimer’s, my father’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and the eventual sale of their home.
When my parents moved into an independent living facility, the Dutch girl hung in their living room, watching over them. When we had to put my mother in an Alzheimer’s facility, my dad and the little Dutch girl moved into our home. Over the years, she not only became the family guardian and historian, but my muse.
While my dad was living with us, a terrific synchro occurred with the Dutch girl. I was asked to speak at an event at the Hibel Museum. So the Dutch girl was removed from the wall and I took her with me and talked about what she had become for me and my family. Edna Hibel was in the audience and came up to me afterward and signed her lovely piece of art.
Not long after that, my mother died in a nursing home of pneumonia. Two years later, my father’s Parkinson’s had progressed to the point where we couldn’t care for him anymore. We moved him to an assisted living facility in Georgia where my sister was head of nursing. The Dutch girl graced one of the walls and looked after him. Every time I visited, I felt that my mother was peering out through the Dutch girl’s eyes.
Two years after my dad moved into the assisted living facility, he was at lunch one day, appeared to have a stroke, and lapsed into a coma. My sister called me and I flew up to Atlanta the next day. The little Dutch girl, my sister, and I remained with my dad for the next two days. We made sure his favorite music was playing and at one point, I remember, I felt my mother’s presence quite strongly and sensed she and my dad were dancing, something they enjoyed when they were younger. I also knew she had come to be with him as he passed on.
Shortly before 11 that night, the facility called us and said his death was imminent. We drove back and were with him when he died at 11 PM. The Dutch girl witnessed this, too. By then, she’d been in our family for 27 years.
My sister and I boxed up my father’s belongings the next day and divided everything. She said she felt I should have the Dutch girl, since I had brought her into our lives. She has moved around in our house – from the living room, to my dad’s former room, to our bedroom. She’s been with us 33 years now and more than 50 books. She has watched our daughter grow into a young woman of 21. But she’s just as cute as the day I bought her. Her eyes, though, do seem sadder and, somehow, wiser.
