Sandy Brown Jensen

When I was a little, I was in love with a mail-order doll named Betsy McCall. At first, she was just a “flat Betsy,” a paper doll who came in one of my mother’s sewing pattern packages. The Betsy doll had been developed as an “advertising vehicle” by Mc Call’s in 1951, as I have learned on the internet, to “promote the use of post war wash n’ wear fabrics like Dacron, nylon and rayon,” sold to homemakers like my Mom, who sewed all her own clothing for all four kids.

At first, she was just a “flat Betsy,” a paper doll who came in one of my mother’s sewing pattern packages. (Photo Credit: http://www.uri.edu/library/special_collections/exhibits/sewing_for_dolly/betsy.jpg

That meant nothing to me as I bent over a card table set up near Mom’s sewing machine and carefully punched out first the little doll, and then her tabbed wardrobe: little dresses and aprons, and a bouquet of flowers to tab on to her hand.

That meant nothing to me as I bent over a card table set up near Mom’s sewing machine and carefully punched out first the little doll, and then her tabbed wardrobe: little dresses and aprons, and a bouquet of flowers to tab on to her hand. (Photo Credit: http://www.uri.edu/library/special_collections/exhibits/sewing_for_dolly/betsy.html)

Mom took the hint, and that Christmas, a real, live, three-dimensional Betsy McCall was hiding under the Tree surrounded by my Mom’s hand-made doll clothes that I could probably sell on E-Bay these days and secure my retirement.

My Betsy was fourteen inches high. She had shoulder-length hair the same dark brown as mine, but hers didn’t fly out in wild ringlets like mine; she had a smooth, tucked under page boy with thick, straight bangs. She wore headbands, just like I did. She came with black patent leather Mary Jane shoes and frilled white ankle socks. Betsy’s arms, legs, and head were all hinged, so she was able to assume many poses, formal and informal as the occasion demanded.

She was able to assume many poses, formal and informal as the occasion demanded.

Betsy McCall pretending she's Scarlett O' Hara. (Photo Credit: http://www.katherinescottage.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_ Code=KC&Product_Code=BMx-T10GWDD04&Category_Code=Eff

My Betsy was rarely seen in pants because she had so many cute dresses. My Aunt Mel was also a talented doll clothes seamstress, so Betsy was never without a new winter coat or an Easter dress for our Grandma Brown’s Sunday school.

Betsy went everywhere with me. Many times, I pushed Betsy in my baby buggy across the yard. The buggy had narrow wheels that bumped on the hard clay underlying the scruffy lawn. Two very old willow trees each had their limbs uplifted and their hair thrown down like my Grandma Ellen used to throw her dark, waist-long hair over her head and face to dry in the sun.

I pushed through the curtain of weepers, which closed behind me with a whisper of leaves.

I pushed through the curtain of weepers, which closed behind me with a whisper of leaves. (Photo Credit: http://www.tgreenhouses.com/plants_tree_willow_niobe_weeping.php)

In this room, Betsy and I had high tea. I had a low table set under there with a chair for Betsy. I took her out of the carriage and changed her clothes. She was always very patient with me, smiling, following me with her eyes as I dressed her in frilly panties, checkered blue and white dress, and a hand-crocheted yellow collar. I set the table, Betsy in her chair listening to my chatter as I created a world for the two of us.

I became completely absorbed in play. For actors, the Green Room is where they wait for their cue to go on stage, a place of waiting. For Betsy and me, it was the stage itself for our intricate and intimate little psychodramas that sprang from the aquifer of dreams under the willow tree.

Mom came out to visit briefly, bringing two saucers of oranges. My orange sections were arranged in a sun spiral. Betsy’s plate had three orange sections arranged in a pinwheel. “Tell your mother that I love the smell of oranges. It reminds me of the Christmas I was born.”

I relayed this message to Mom, and she accepted with a smile. “Thank you, Betsy. You certainly have lovely manners.” Betsy looked down with a shy smile.

When it was time to go in the house, Mom called from the door, “Sandy, you and Betsy need to come set the big table for dinner now.”

I carefully repacked the baby buggy, recruiting Sojah the cat, who tolerated a bonnet and rode on her back, calico paws on the coverlet beside Betsy as we pushed aside the willows like a glass bead curtain and left the Green Room behind.

Sojah, our calico cat, was amenable to tea parties. (Source of image: tampacatladymdse.com)

Betsy was quite adventurous and rode looking out of my day pack on family hikes in the high Cascades. She teetered on log bridges crossing fast moving streams. She liked me to pause so we could watch the water ouzel flicking in and out of its nest under a small waterfall.

My Mom and I agreed that is there is such a thing as reincarnation, we would like to come back as water ouzels who can swim underwater in fast-moving creeks and have their nests behind waterfalls.

The old cedar forests with their goats beard moss intrigued her. We gathered it and made textured blankets by weaving it with stems of sorrel and pink current flowers. There was no part of the wild world that didn’t interest Betsy, and she once told me how grateful she was that she had been sent by Santa to live with me.

A couple of years ago, my Mom, now in her mid-80s, reminded me of Betsy’s fate and how all these decades later, she still felt terrible about her part in it. I had forgotten, with that selective forgetfulness pain often blesses us with, but her reminder opened the Green Room of memory.

Betsy and I and our family went to Glacier National Park one summer vacation. On the morning we were to drive up to Logan Pass, we were camped at Sprague Creek.

We camped at Sprague Creek Campground near the West entrance to Glacier National Park (Photo credit: Ryan Hadley)

Betsy and I played under a very large, very ancient cedar with many thick roots reaching out into the spongy duff of the forest floor. Mom and Daddy were striking camp, and I could hear the distant sounds of my siblings.

I changed Betsy’s clothes for the trip. I spread out her wooly red blanket against a root that had deer ferns growing on it that bent over and created a perfect, Betsy-sized nook. She sat still, smiled and said, “I’ll wait for you right here while you go to the bathroom to get ready for the drive. Don’t worry, I’ll be right here.”

On the way back from the rest room, Daddy pulled up in the packed family International Travel All, leaned out the window and said, “Time’s awastin’! Hop in!”

I hopped in, and away we went up the Going to the Sun highway, with its views of Mt. Logan and Gunsight Pass. We were almost to the top of Logan Pass when I remembered Betsy waiting for me under the tree. “I’ll wait right here until you get back,” she had said to me with her bright smile, hands folded in her pink and white pinafore, the deer fern framing her head.

My heart-rending tears and pleas to return echo in my mother’s heart to this day, and I am sorry for that. She has told me she has wished a thousand times she and Warren had understood who Betsy was to me and had had the compassion and sense to turn back.

Now that I have remembered, I am pierced again with Betsy’s faith that if she waited, I would return. Mom’s best thought was that she was found by some lucky other girl, but in my mind, she is still there in that green room, beautifully dressed, poised and waiting.

Mom’s best thought was that she was found by some lucky other girl, but in my mind, she is still there in that green room, beautifully dressed, poised and waiting. (Photo credit: collectdolls.about.com)

When I am most deeply at play, absorbed in the world of a story I am telling to myself, Betsy is with me as she has always been, telling me again how she likes the sharp smell of oranges, how the filtered light of our private room under the willow tree reminds her of a dream she wants to tell.

When I am most deeply at play, absorbed in the world of a story I am telling to myself, Betsy is with me as she has always been, telling me again how the filtered light of our private room under the willow tree reminds her of a dream she wants to tell. (Photo credit: http://burgette.net/poems/weepingwillow/weepingwillow.html)

Dec.  21st, 2010

Myth of Me Question #21: How would you get to school and back each day?

I spent ten years of my life riding Bus #15 to school and back.

Over the years we graduated from a snouted bus to a blunt-nosed one, but they were both #15

Our bus stop was the furthest out on its route at the bus turnaround. Reliably, five days a week, Mom would have the household in a 7:00 am turmoil of Cream of Wheat, lunch pails, coats, boots and school supplies as we heard the bus motor downshift at the top of the long hill down to the turnaround where we were supposed to be in the three minutes it would take to make its lumbering descent.

Our driveway was the best part of a quarter mile long and ran between Horse Lake Creek and the apple orchard. The road was protected from creek floodwaters by a high berm with a hard-packed up and down roller coaster path on top. It was hard-packed because of years of Brown kids running it to catch the bus.

By the time the yellow dinosaur had jockeyed itself around to point its nose back at school, the Brown kids would have come flying up out of the creek bed and clambered on board: the first ones on in the morning, the last off in the afternoon.

I’ve never heard anything good about the sociology of school kid interaction on school buses. It’s a viper pit. I have plenty of memories of being shoved, called names, and subjected to a variety of petty cruelties that hurt and traumatized me at the time. But all my best friends I met on the bus: in fact, we became friends only by the coincidence of being on the same bus route, nothing else such as mutual interests drew us together. Yet these friends and their families have continued to interact with ours long into the future. I just got a Christmas card from Teresa Moro Johnson, a school friend of my sister Toren’s from Wenatchee.

I remember getting off the bus on Dawn Avenue because I was throwing up and Mrs. Petty, my sister Cheryl’s future mother-in-law, finding me and driving me home.

I remember one snowy icy morning looking up the hill and watching that huge bus slide the last leg of the hill sideways on the ice. The driver chained up at the turnaround. Winters were always punctuated with the rhythm of clanking chains.

These buses were so reliable we were seldom given a "Snow Day."

Sometimes my memories are of captured moments only, as if I were photographing myself. There I am, one fall morning actually walking to the bus stop instead of my usual frenzied rush. Mom must have told me to get an apple for my lunch. I stop in front of my favorite tree– one half Red Delicious, one half Golden Delicious.

Golden Delicious Apples, Wenatchee Style. Painting by artist Jan Cook Mack (Photo Credit: http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2010/nov/24/check-it-out-art/?print)

The branches are loaded with fruit, so heavy that they are supported with dozens of long, splintery wooden props. I love the contrasting colors of red and yellow apples, and while I know about grafting, it still seems amazing to have two kinds of apples on one tree.

Golden and Red Delicous apples can come from the same tree. Painting by Jan Cook Mack (Photo Credit: http://www.appleblossom.org/)

The bus is coming; the decision is agonizing. Then the answer becomes obvious red for school, yellow for coming home.  I choose a fine fruit and rub it against my sweater as if all the layers of pesticide spray were only on the surface. We didn’t know from organic in those days.

I remember running for the bus under the same trees in May with the trees in full pink and white blossom, a slight breeze shaking down petals that landed in my hair, on the apple of my cheeks, petals that had to be stomped from shoes before hiking myself up the black steps into the bus.

The 2010 Apple Blossom Art Print by artist Bob Jamison is a portrait of Wenatchee-area landmark Saddlerock as seen through the eyes of an apple orchard in full bloom. (Photo Credit: http://www.appleblossom.org/)

"Pollination" Watercolor by my sister artist Cheryl Renee Long (Photo Credit: http://www.cherylrlong.com)

In the winter, instead of snowing petals, big cold snowflakes created an intimate white tunnel between the house and the bus.

Sometimes the snow came before the apples got picked. "APPLE ORCHARD IN WINTER, WASHINGTON, USA." Photo by Steve Satushek (Website credit: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/10164190/The-Image-Bank)

In early summer, as school was coming to an end, the fine white power of the road poufed out from under my school shoes, and we had to watch for rattlesnakes on the road.

Orchard Road. Painting by William Fischer (Photo Credit: http://www.appleblossom.org)

I remember on sick days laying on the couch in front of the window; how strange it was to watch the bus go up the long hill to the right of my field of vision to disappear into Mr. Brogan’s orchard at the upper left of the window. Then the house would be quiet with all the other kids gone and only the sounds of Mom doing the dishes.

I am a sixty-year-old teacher now and still commuting to school every day. I’m not motivated to do the math, but I wonder how many years in sum I have spent of my life traveling back and forth from schools? That has got to be some kind of real number when I remember the commute from a house up in the foothills above Loveland, Colorado down to CSU in Ft. Collins in all weather;

In 1989-90, I commuted in my Jeep Cherokee from Lovelend to CSU in Ft. Collins in all weather! (Photo Credit: skyscrapercity.com)

and the four hours a day I spent in a commute between Eugene and Linfield College in McMinnville;

Linfield looks so Ivy League, it's hard to believe it's in the Willamette Valley instead of Vermont. I loved working there, but the four-hour commute was a killer! (Photo Credit: stateuniversity.com)

the late-night commutes and over the Mohawk when I worked the LBCC Sweet Home Center, or the miles I put on when I worked at the Benton Center in Corvallis?

LBCC Sweet Home Center in the foothills of the Cascades an hour from Eugene over the Mohawk Pass. (Photo Credit: flickr.com)

But since I was a kid riding Bus #15 in the 1950s, I’ve been one to look out the window at the world and to use commute time to bird watch, to enjoy the changing seasons, to think through the issues of the day like a fabric artist mentally sorting threads and discovering patterns for the weaving of the day.

Landscape Weaving by Textile Artist Linda Bankshansee. "Green and Brown Landscape with Starfish." A hand-dyed wool with brown, green, turquoise and gold forms the base color in this landscape. These colors repeated in the section of undulating forms at the horizon. The sky in this weaving is woven of a neutral gold-colored rayon with cloud forms of yellow rayon and chenille. Brown tree forms are sewn along the horizon line and a few brown shells and a small starfish have been added in the lower middle of the weaving." (Photo Credit: lindabankshansee.com)