I found myself at BabyLand General Hospital, the home of the Cabbage Patch Kids, on a lark. Late last year, I attended a writing residency at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences near Dillard, Georgia. Winding my way through the North Georgia mountains, I saw one billboard after another advertising the tourist attraction, in Cleveland, with an image of one of the dolls, a round-faced, ruddy-cheeked girl with pigtails. Once one of the most popular toys of my 1980s childhood, Cabbage Patch Kids can still be found on store shelves, though they seem of a bygone time, a relic of the era before electronic doodads like Nano Pets gave way to the gaming boom. I hadn’t thought about the dolls in decades, but the ads ignited my nostalgia.
At Hambidge I bonded with Jane, a Los Angeles ceramist, and Zoe, a violinist specializing in were filmed. Thanks to those billboards, we planned to wander the gardens and grounds of BabyLand. Then we would jaunt to the German-inspired town of Helen.
