A Yellowed Suction Cup

It’s a rainy Sunday and my house is filled with the smell of melting plastic.

The melting plastic is from one of those homemade sun catchers where you dump the little beads into the different sections and bake it in the oven so the beads melt and look like glass. It was created by my 6-year-old after she won a kit at a mommy-daughter tea.

It’s one of those suncatchers that will hang in her window for the next 15 years, occasionally falling thanks to a cheap and yellowing suction cup that you will lick the back of and reapply. It will be there when she’s in junior high and high school, in the corner, forgotten and covered by the drapes. It will be there when she comes home from college and looks up at her childhood window from the driveway. It will maybe even make it into a box that we pack for her when she moves to New York and we are retiring to the beach. It will be a little dusty, just a touch sun-bleached, and we will have licked and reapplied the suction cup dozens, maybe hundreds of times by then.

And today I am making it, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, with my 6-year-old, amidst the smell of melting plastic, on the day after a mother-daughter tea.

​Isn’t life the coolest?

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