When I was seven or eight, I became fascinated by the adage, "every time a bell rings, an angle gets it's wings." Angles were all well and good, I'd even played one in a Christmas pageant or two, but what I was really interested in was fairies. If bells made angles, how was it that fairies got their wings? After several under the covers brainstorming sessions I decided that it must be bubbles. Every time a bubble popped a fairy was born. It didn't have the same ring, but I never was much of a poet.
Since I had a knack for convincing myself that make believe things, even those I had dreamed up on my own, were absolutely real, I set about blowing bubbles as much as possible. Which wasn't hard, what kid doesn't spend their summer with a bottle of 99cent bubble mix, their fingers sticky and slippery with the concentrated soapy water.
My favorite place for blowing bubble was our vegetable garden. In my mind, I was helping the fairies along, no popping on the asphalt in front of the house for my magical creatures. No, they would be born amidst the runner beans and potato plants. I could lie on my back between the two gray wooden raised beds furthest from the deck where my little brother played and blow bubbles to my hearts content.
Today the kids and I went for a walk. Well, I hobbled a little on my still injured foot and they walked. Will is one day away from what could (please please please!) be his very last Architectural Licensing Exam and I wanted to give him some quiet study time so we meandered up to see the chickens then onto the park and finally downtown where we were disappointed to find the cookie store closed. Not wanting to head home yet and needing a little sugar kick, we backtracked up the street to the pharmacy and bought a pack of M and M's and, on impulse, a bottle of bubbles.
There really is something magical about bubbles. Even Briton, who is fast approaching the age of not believing, grinned and laughed and chased them as we walked home. Evelyn sat out on the porch swing while we ate lunch and tried endlessly to produced a stream of rainbow hued bubbles, getting most of the solution down the front of her dress and not a little in her mouth. (It's spicy! she said, spitting. Spicy is her catch all word for things she does not like the taste of)
Go buy some bubbles. Even if you don't have any kids around, go get some. You've forgotten, I promise you, the sheer delight that comes from blowing through that tiny wand and watching the bubbles float away on the breeze. And even if you haven't forgotten, even if you blew bubbles yesterday, go get some anyway. The world is always in need of more fairies.