Dreamhouse

This morning on the BBC News an Australian kidnapper was sentenced to jail for abducting a little girl from a campsite and holding her hostage for some time before she was rescued from a locked bedroom in his house. I couldn’t help but briefly wonder if Sarah might not be found in this lair as well and liberated and returned to us. The article said that the captor wore headphones to drown out the sound of the girl crying for her mother. This is a horrible detail.

I have to remind myself that Sarah has not been abducted and she is not being prevented from returning to me. Wherever she is, she is whole and happy and well-looked after.

When Sarah was doing therapeutic riding and ballet a few years ago, before Covid, there were three girls around the same age in her riding group on Sundays. It was Sarah, Leila, and Frida. Each girl used a wheelchair and all loved horses. Leila’s dad Massoud was raising her alone after her mom, Nahid, who was one of my best friends for several years, died of breast cancer very quickly and suddenly. Massoud and I became good friends for a few years then too.

Massoud would always talk about how Leila and Sarah, and Frida too, needed to all live together in a big house when they grew up, and how we needed to plan for that and get that set up. I agreed it was a great idea. I enjoyed our co-fantasy of Sarah and Leila and Frida as grown-up gals on the go, fashionistas with a hectic social calendar, sort of an ADA-friendly version of the Mystery Date board game I used to play with my friends in the 70’s.

Our riding school was beset by a series of management woes for a couple of years, and Sarah also had major back surgery when she was 10 to straighten a more than 90-degree curve in her spine that kept her from riding for quite a while. The combination of Covid and only sporadic therapeutic riding led us to lose touch with Massoud and Leila and Mary and Frida after about 2019. I heard reports from our mutual physical therapist about Leila but that was about it. Massoud dropped out of Facebook too.

I still love the idea of Sarah, Leila, and Frida living together in their Barbie Dreamhouse. Having adventures and epic pool parties. Forever.