All these orphans remind me of one of my favorite fairy tales when I was a kid . It was about a Russian girl who was driven out by her stepmother and finds herself in the cottage of Baba Yaga. The cottage is on chicken legs, which gives you some idea of what Baba Yaga's like.

The girl has a little, magical doll whose eyes twinkle and which speaks when given a tiny offering of beer and bread. Is the doll her mother's spirit? Could be.

At one point the doll says something I have remembered all my life. It said, "The morning is wiser than the evening." More than once in my life I have found that a problem I couldn't solve at night had become clear by morning. And also, anger that wanted to be expressed in the evening had changed into an intelligent plan for changing things by morning.