Martha Catherine Ivey
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It’s kind of silly, isn’t it? That blowing through a wand coated with liquid soap could be so magical, yet it is, it is. What other word is there to describe the creation of bubbles? You start with a bottle full of soap and end up with delicate, transparent, iridescent spheres that float with a bumbling grace, perhaps drifting along with the breeze for awhile or plummeting lazily toward the earth, reflecting faces, trees, clouds, shimmering in the sun, until — pop! — the end.
It’s a silly pursuit, no doubt about it. Blowing soap bubbles on a summer afternoon is not exactly an effective use of time. Bubbles aren’t important, after all, and they’re gone so quickly that it’s always necessary to blow more of them, if we could in fact say it’s necessary at all. They delight for only a few seconds, are beautiful for only a moment before they give up and become memories — that splatter of soap was once a bubble — we might say that bubble-blowing is childhood’s way of introducing us to the Sisyphean.
And yet (there is always an “and yet”) without regard to silliness, or perhaps because of it, we do it anyway, and our eyes light up as we watch them go. And it is wonderful. It is grand.
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