Thanksgiving/Pre-Christmas Post

Being poor wasn't always all deprivation and sadness.  Sometimes we got things other people would never get.   Like the Christmas when my mother, the art school dropout, sewed for each of us, without so much as a pattern, a completely unique stuffed dog puppet --  each one built upon a sock, covered by a realistic body of stuffing and fabric store fur and brown beads for eyes -- and noses molded by clay with two holes for sewing and then painted a shiny black before she'd attached them. The red fabric tongues that would hang out happily when we held them close to us and made them say whatever we wanted them to.