Clarissa's Blog

Talking about stuff, what’s the object you have owned the longest? Taking into account how many times I moved both long and short distance, I obviously haven’t managed to save a lot of things from my childhood. But I did preserve my most favorite childhood toy, this little plastic piglet that you see in the photo.

Of course, I had dolls, and some really beautiful ones, too. But there was no doll I loved like this cheap plastic piglet. I created a wardrobe for him that was fit for royalty. I took him everywhere with me, never slept without him.

I first got this toy on a trip to Kiev with my father when I was 5. A little over a year later, my baby sister decided to use him on her freshly sprouted teeth, which is how the piglet lost his nose. I’m not sure I have managed fully to forgive my sister for mutilating my toy even 34 years later. Of course, there’s a pickled apple she’s holding over my head for a little over quarter century, so we’re almost even.

It’s really funny that out of everything I owned and lost it’s a little plastic piglet costing 11 copeck in 1981 that would travel all the way across the globe, from one country to another, from one state to the next.