“Mom, blow a bubble! Please! Please!”
It all started so simply, my son dancing around the living room until I did his bidding. But by now the bubbles have me. I can’t get them out of my mind. My son has a huge obsession with gum chewing and is constantly begging me to blow bubbles. He sits patiently on my lap as I chew, waiting for the bubble to expand and for his chance, if quick enough, to pop the gum all over my face.
These bubbles have taken hold, and I can’t stop. First it was soap bubbles. I love blowing bubbles, hearing the giggles of my children as they chase the soapy spheres through the yard. And as I started thinking, I remembered a night about two decades ago when I was blowing soapy bubbles outside my freshman dorm on a Saturday night. And no, I had not been drinking. It sure was fun, though, to see the looks and antics of the people who had been drinking as they chased my bubbles through the street!
My mind flits to Macbeth’s three witches and my ill-remembered “Double, double toil and trouble” as the cauldron bubbles. They were wishing a double dose of bad wishes on the man himself as they stirred their pot. I suppose it is no coincidence that I have this memory as I watch my own three little monsters stirring a pot of mud, snow, wood- chips and goop in the fire pit with their plastic golf clubs and giant sand shovels . They are out enjoying the barest, earliest moments of almost-spring and I laugh as I watch them dig through mounds of snow to find the tiniest scraps of dirt. I am sure from watching these antics that the spring’s first worm farm cannot be far behind.
And speaking of sleeping with the fishes, I can’t lose these pictures I have in my head of floating long-haired women with the last of their carbon dioxide floating as bubbles to the surface. Perhaps I have read one too many mystery stories, or maybe I am the long-haired heroine, swamped and flailing and fighting to the surface. I am accused like the witches in Salem. I always loved those odds. If you lived you were a witch and would be hung. If you died you would be proven innocent. But still you’d be dead. Sometimes that sounds pretty familiar.
Bubbles and more bubbles. The financial crisis of bubble mortgages. And now it turns out that Siberia’s frozen sea-bed is emitting fierce greenhouse gasses and bubbles that are going to advance global warming. Certainly not all child’s play around here.
Life on the bubble. That is me at this moment. Bouncing, bounding, fluttering, flooding, drowning, popping.
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