A handprint

Moments becoming memories 

WHEN THE SUN is filtering through the glass entry door to the kitchen some mornings, I can still see a faint little handprint left by my great-granddaughter Kinsley when she was 2. 

I don’t notice it much anymore, but sometimes when I turn from the coffee maker and am standing in just the right place, the small, semi-transparent hand catches my eye and brings a smile.

She lives in Utah, 1,600 miles away, so I don’t see her as much as I’d like. My wife, Jackie, passed away a few months before she would have seen Kinsley for the first time; a dress for Kinsley was the last Christmas gift she bought.

So the handprint, while it may be only a smudge to some, is to me a Valentine, a Christmas gift and a little handful of poignant memories.

There was a time when I might have erased it with glass cleaner if I noticed it at all, but children’s handprints, and even a few accidental crayon marks, often become treasures when viewed from life’s other end. So I’ve been careful to avoid the handprint when cleaning the glass.

We’ll never know its true composition—short of laboratory analysis—but I’m guessing it might have McNugget or Krispy Kreme properties.

When Kinsley left it, she was gazing in near disbelief out the back door at fireflies—which I call “lightning bugs”—lifting from the backyard at twilight. She had never seen them, her parents told me; they don’t seem to have them where they live in Utah.

I may have given them a lecture on the dangers of bringing up a child in a place where there are no lightning bugs, before shooing them into the backyard where Kinsley hesitantly gave chase to the blinking lights with wings.

It took me back to my own lightning bug nights and June bug days as a Kentucky farm kid, and even to a large “snap bug” (click beetle), which I kept for a while as a pet.

Kinsley eventually caught two or three lightning bugs, gently cupped them in her hands and watched, wide-eyed, as they magically produced beautiful light—without batteries, or even energy from our local rural electric cooperative!

Thus began another generation of lightning bug lovers in our family.

At last, the hand that captured light in the backyard would wave goodbye, as Kinsley and her parents left for the plane trip back to Utah. But her wonderful handprint lingers on the back door glass to wave and remind me of a quote attributed to Dr. Seuss: “Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory.”

As I write this reflection, word arrives that Kinsley, now 4 years old, has a brand-new baby brother, Brooks Garrison Crawford. Maybe there will be another tiny handprint left on the kitchen door glass, one summer evening when he sees lightning bugs for the first time.