Crib, Adieu

With the dismantling of the crib, a twinge of melancholy. Not that Ann has actually used the crib recently, or even that much when she was very small. In recent years, it’s been a repository for bedding and other items. But we’re participating in a garage sale at someone else’s garage this weekend, so we took some things over there this evening, including the dismantled crib, baby clothes, a saucer-exerciser and other baby-oriented items that are merely taking up space these days.

They won’t return. If not sold, they will be donated. We have enough stuff around here, so they need to go.

I didn’t include the mobile formerly attached to the crib in the for-sale bin. It sports three pastel-colored rabbits on strings and plays “Rockabye Baby” – about as standard-issue a mobile as you can imagine, but it has sentimental value beyond associations with girls who are no longer little babies. It was a gift from Flo, a personable, exceedingly competent secretary at the place I worked when Lilly was born. In her mid-60s or so, Flo retired not long after that and passed away not too many years later. So rather than sell the mobile to strangers, sometime I’ll find someone we know with a little baby to give it to.

(I googled “Rockabye Baby” and one of the top entries included this version, meant to inculcate the class struggle at a tender age, I guess:

Rockabye baby, on the tree top,
When you grow up, you'll work in a shop,
When you get married, your wife will work, too
So that the rich will have nothing to do.)