One of the things I love most about motherhood: how being with my son opens the floodgates for memories from my own childhood to come tumbling back at the most random times. They're like little presents, these memories; like little unexpected vacations back to fleeting moments that I thought I had forgotten, or perhaps never knew I remembered.

Tonight before dinnertime, Harper and I sat on the front grass. I was blowing bubbles and he was doing everything he could to grab the bottle of bubble solution out of my hand. In my effort to keep the bottle away from him, I was not careful to let the excess solution drain from the wand before raising it up, and it was dripping all over my fingers and down my wrist.

Suddenly I had a very vivid sensory memory of blowing bubbles in the front yard of the house I grew up in at dusk on a summer evening, competing with my sister and the neighborhood kids to see who could blow the biggest bubbles, focusing so intensely on releasing our breath as slowly and evenly as possible that we didn't care about the way the ridges on those tiny plastic wands that come with the cheap toy-store bubbles hold only the sheerest film of bubble solution, and the excess would drip down the handle and all over our hands and wrists and forearms, and after it would dry in the warm air our skin would feel all itchy until the street lights came on and someone's mom would call them in and it was time to go home and take a bath.