Are fragile memories best left unpreserved?

Round and iridescent, delicate and weightless, bubbles blown from the lips of my strapping husband danced on the light breeze. We’d secured a particularly good bubble-blowing kit as a birthday gift for my youngest, and the results were no less than magic. The temperature outside was perfect, and the relentless Kansas wind had finally decided to take a time-out. Beauty stacked upon beauty until a permanent memory of that evening was etched in my mind. Bubbles and giggles and family and love.

But bubbles, much like memories, are fragile. If you try to contain them, they break. If you try to preserve them, they lose their value, no longer free to float and fly and delight as they’re intended. They become a soapy mess on your hand. When left untouched, you see their full beauty. You enjoy their full spectrum of colors, and marvel at the variety of shapes and sizes.

Are fragile memories best left unpreserved? Are they, like bubbles, best enjoyed when left to float on the breeze in our minds, colorful and fleeting? I didn’t have this in mind when I began snapping photos last night. Wit the bright sun flooding my eyes, I could barely see what my touch screen was capturing. Click. Click. Click. Repeatedly I hit the button, unwilling to let these bubbles, and memories, go.

Eventually, my phone died, and I was left to the camera in my mind. Frame upon frame I snapped as I walked down to the bridge with my girls. But I didn’t capture just images. Smells. Sounds. Sensations. A quarter mile of dirt road, a concrete structure suspended over a creek just beginning to fill with spring rains. The sweet smell of fertile earth and budding plants mixed with the occasional pungent whiff of cow manure from the neighbor’s pasture. A sticky toddler hand in my left, a sweaty preschool hand in my right. The shuffle-slap sound of my daughter’s pink, square-toe cowboy boots running through gravel. The splash-splash-pant of our black lab taking dips in the water.

Too soon, this evening had to end. Reluctant children forced to re-enter reality with the setting sun. And even though I wasn’t able to preserve each and every memory as I would have liked, I am grateful. They’re now free to dance in my mind with shifting colors and a fragile beauty that can only be compared to…bubbles.