While we were home over Christmas a few months ago my mom pulled out an old trunk of childhood memorabilia that she wanted us to sort through. She had been cleaning out the store room and needed help deciding what could be thrown or given away and what needed to be kept for sentimental value so we sat down on the floor, popped open the latches on the trunk and began rummaging through a moldy treasure chest of memories.
The first few things to come out of the mildewy box made us laugh and roll our eyes in embarrassment. There was the brown dog whose tail is stubby and bare from years of being rubbed up against my thumb-sucking sister’s nose, the black pupils of his wide eyes worn off so that he only stares through white cataracts now. There was a purple diary full of half-finished stories and elaborate plays each with fantastical titles like “The Naladite Ring” or “The Black Pearl” complete with scratched out stage directions and dramatic ellipses at chapter breaks. There was a plush button box whose pink floral pattern belied the contents of its inner compartments: rows and rows of rocks, some polished smooth from a store-bought collection, others rough and still clinging to the dirt they were discovered in, all lying side by side like the crown jewels. Each thing that came out of the trunk seemed more precious than the last and each pulled behind it a string of stories about the day it was lost, found, imagined, discovered, fought over, broken or rescued. But of all the things we rediscovered that afternoon, none was as precious to me as Anna Bell.
Anna Bell was a Christmas present to me when I was probably six or seven years old. I had seen her first in a stationers shop in Mombasa which had a basement full of plastic toys lay underneath the ground floor of notebooks and pencil sharpeners. She was sitting on a shelf in a pink knit onesie and hat between her identical twins in blue and yellow. I didn’t know at the time that she was a Prince William doll, her blinking blue eyes and plastic swirls of reddish-blond hair meant to depict royal British offspring. To me she was just the most beautiful girl doll I had ever seen. Someone must have been paying attention that day because a few weeks later, there she was wrapped up in garish paper under the tree with my name on her. I was in love.
My mother may not even remember sitting down next to me and helping me straighten the doll’s socks after all the presents had been opened, but I remember her words like she was passing on some sacred family secret that I was responsible for guarding with my life. “This is your baby now, and you need to take good care of her. And the first thing a mother does is think up with a good name for her baby.” I took her words to heart and spent what literally must have been the next three days thinking of the most beautiful name in the whole world. I thumbed through the worn baby name book we had lying around the house and made lists of all the lovely princess names I could think of. I reread my favorite Bible stories and mulled over all the friend’s names I had ever envied. In the end, I still don’t know where the name came from. It was neither a friend nor a princess that I had ever heard of. But at the end of three days I made a pronouncement: “Her name is Anna Bell.” It was the most beautiful name I had ever heard.
When I pulled a twenty-year old Anna Bell out of the trunk and squeezed her to my chest with a cry of delight in December, Bryan was understandably a little creeped out. Though she obviously hadn’t aged much, the years had still not been kind to Anna Bell. Her marble eyes were cocked a little oddly now so that they didn’t quite close when she went to sleep and grey mold was permanently encrusted in the pink whorls or her ears. But even so, as an adult woman, I had a hard time not wanting to cradle her in my arms and carry her around again, and an even harder time putting her back to bed in the dusty trunk. Just looking at her brought back a wave of memories in tree houses and mango trees. Even after all these years, she was still so precious.
When it came time to name you, Annabelle, I wracked my brains once again to think of the most beautiful name in the world. I went through books and websites, Bible stories and poetry, relatives and friends. Your Papa and I played with different names over our coffee at breakfast and in the dark at night before we fell asleep. It took us a couple months this time, but in the end we decided that Annabelle was the most beautiful name in the world for you. Our hope and prayer is that grace and inner beauty will always mark your life.
You are not named after a doll I had as a little girl, though I feel like in some ways maybe she was named after you. From the time I was seven years old I think I have been dreaming about you and preparing to meet you. I think I have always loved you with all my heart, though I know I still have so much to learn about what that means. I can’t wait to see the incredible gift you will be and get to know who you are and who you will become. I’ve never been a Mama before, so you may have to be a little patient with me at first. But I promise that you will always be my baby and that I will always take care of you. I love you so much already and can’t wait to meet you in just a few weeks. With God’s grace, we have lots of stories ahead together. We have so many memories to make, sweet girl.
