The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

The Velvateen Rabbit by Margery Williams

I spent the late afternoon on Sunday going through three bins of stuffed animals and dolls that were at my Mom’s house (and that I rescued from heading into the dumpster in her driveway courtesy of their new kitchen project) and keeping the ones I wanted to share with Blink and putting others into bags for donations. A lot of memories came back as I picked up each of my Madame Alexander dolls. I washed all their clothes, redressed them and put them up in the nursery. They will end up on a high shelf until the little miss is old enough to play with them, but I’m really looking forward to sharing them with her.

As an only child for most of my life (until I met my step-siblings and my half brother was born), I had real attachments to my dolls and stuffed animals. They were my siblings. And this is one reason I’ve vowed to not have only one child. Not that I regret bonding with inanimate objects, but the fact that I just can NOT let go!

Standing in my mother’s basement while EHH surveyed the three bins full of animals and dolls that we would be taking home – into our house with no storage space, he sighed and said, “But we just got RID of so much stuff!” I had to fight back tears.

“You can’t make me throw these things out! You just can’t!”

I tried to explain how attached I felt to them. Even though they’d been in Mom’s basement for years and I haven’t even SEEN these dolls since 1993, I was still attached. And I couldn’t THINK of them being thrown in a dumpster without showing real emotion.

I agreed to sort through the stuffed animals if we could find a place to donate them to. I’m not sure Good Will takes stuffed animals, but they’re on my list of places to call tomorrow to find out. I’m okay with some unfortunate child benefiting from the stuffed animals that kept me company all those years I looked to them to do just that (at least the ones with both eyes still in tact), but again, no dumpster.

And there’s just no way that anyone’s getting Bunner.

THAT. Is Real.

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