One day, not too long ago, our grand daughter Agnes, almost 14, told us she was going to give up her stuffed animal collection. We were shocked.

Agnes has loved stuffies from the time she was born, or at least pretty close to then. The first stuffie I remember was a whitish bunny with a pink nose who is now grey with age. That bunny went everywhere with her. I lost track of which stuffies came next. But Agnes didn’t. She gave them all names and cared for them with a mother’s love.

Agnes’s favourite game with the stuffies was playing school. We would go down to her basement playroom, aka classroom, and she would line up all the “students” and take attendance. Then she would call on me, the classroom assistant, to organize the activity centres. We’d divide the stuffies; Racoon, Tiger, Sarah, Chicken, Chef, Seal, Parrot and the others, and let them all play together. Then a fight would break out and Sarah would get sent to the office, (thrown unceremoniously into a closet), meaning that the teacher wanted to play a different game, so school was dismissed for the day.

These stuffies grew in number and took on various roles in Agnes’s young life: passengers in her little stroller, characters in dramatic scenes that she made up, sleeping companions in her bed at night. As time went on, they moved to places on her dresser or on bookshelves, and finally in bags in a storage cupboard. The special ones went with her to New Zealand on a family trip while those left behind were shrink-wrapped for safe-keeping.

Then Agnes began to grow up and develop other interests, and the stuffies retired to the background of her life. One day, when the family was packing up for a move to a new residence, Agnes was confronted with the size of her collection. That white-grey bunny now had almost 70 companions. But the enormity of her collection was nothing compared to the enormity of the decision she had to make. What to do with all those small souls who had been part of her life for 13 years?

The answer came as welcome relief. Our local community center, Stonegate Ministry, was co-hosting a BBQ with a local church. The Summer Sizzler was to be held on a Saturday in May. There would be a lot of kids attending with their parents and, while the parents socialized together, what were the kids going to do to amuse themselves?

Agnes is familiar with this church. She donated her books when she was younger and, a few times, she joined me on a Saturday to help kids pick out a book to take home. So, when I mentioned the BBQ, she was more than happy to donate her stuffies – the whole collection.

On Summer Sizzler Saturday morning, the stuffies were set up on a table near the entrance – the best spot in the event. The kids quickly gathered around the table. Soon Parrot was flying around the grounds on somebody’s shoulder, Racoon was being hugged to death, Chicken was squawking on the head of an energetic boy, and Elephant was joining a rabbit sibling.

In the end all the stuffies found new homes. And Agnes can move on with her life, knowing that her childhood companions are well taken care of.

Sue