A friend’s child came to play at our house recently. I forgot to put away a box containing our fragile Easter glitter globe. It had been on the landing since May, waiting patiently for an open hand to give it a lift upstairs, back to the attic box marked “Seasonal.” My kids don’t notice the constant piles on the stairs anymore, but this child was Meriwether Lewis on the unexplored frontier. She rifled through the heap of library books and pajamas and couldn’t resist opening the mysterious teal box. I was just steps away on the screeened porch, retrieving lunch dishes. “Mom,” my son called from inside. “Something broke.”

No one was hurt. The children were on the landing, old enough now to respect the danger of broken glass. “Sorry,” our visitor said. “It’s all right, these things happen.”  For all my maternal shortcomings, I have the strength of being relaxed when things spill or shatter. Two sets of eyes blinked through the balusters while I brushed curved chards into the dustpan. The globe’s glitter and glycerin made our floorboards sparkle like new again.

I thought about keeping the Easter globe. The music box in the base still worked. The bunnies looked shaken by their ordeal and I wanted to spare them from another. I tried to free the broken glass from the perimeter of the base and cut myself. After a few photographs, I set the globe gently atop the kitchen trash.

Later I looked at the images of the bunnies, sitting innocently in the midst of destruction. It’s funny what the mind links together. I recalled a photograph taken of the Daniel Boone statue in Louisville’s Cherokee Park on April 4, 1974.  It was the day after a massive tornado destroyed swaths of the city. The tip of Boone’s rifle was barely discernible in a sea of splintered trees. I was five years old–barely older than my son is now. We lived just a few miles from the park but suffered no harm. For years after the tornado I poured over a book of photographs that documented its ravages, including the one of Daniel Boone. In another image, someone had spray-painted on the side of his destroyed home, “Chicken Little was Right.”

For sale online: ruby slippers for $17.48 plus $7.95 shipping. Or plain $10 slippers, $0.98 vials of red glitter and $2 glue.  Donald Trump, I ask you. Suze Orman, you, too. What would you do?

My daughter swallowed a loose tooth yesterday, or did she? It was there one minute, then gone the next. We scoured the house on all fours, and re-examined stark white tissues blotted with blood from her gums. “What if the tooth fairy won’t come,” she cried. “Now, now, the tooth fairy doesn’t need the actual tooth, she just needs you to lose it,” I explained. Her streaming tears oiled loose the hinges of her classroom door.  “The girl who sits next to me is very unkind,” she confessed. I learned that it’s been bad for a week. The topic has eluded our walks to school, afternoons on the sofa, dinnertime chats, bedtime stories, and weekend drapey drapes.

It was late last night when I finished the email to her teacher, filling her in, saying I’d be at school early to confer. I forgot about the tooth. Later, I wrote my client, “I’ll be up another half hour if you want to call about the kitchen island.” The base cabinet wasn’t built the way we intended, and it cost a lot of money. We’re sorting it out, night-owl to night-owl.

This morning at 6:30, I heard my daughter’s footsteps down the hall. As she approached my bed in the dark, I could see her excited eyes. In her outstretched hand she held a note she’d found under her pillow. She thought it was from the tooth fairy. But it was her own letter explaining the missing tooth. The note I’d forgotten to retrieve and respond to after navigating around the bully and the island.

“Go see if she left you a treasure,” I whispered, sending her back to her room. “Tiptoe,” I added, glancing over at my sleeping husband.  When I joined her a few minutes later, she was seated on the edge of her bed. “There’s nothing here,” she said.  I said, “Let’s look together.”  As we pushed aside bed linens, I planted a gold Sacagawea dollar under a pillow, the pink one with the rosebud print. Minutes before, my outstretched fingers had felt for the coin along the crowded top shelf of my closet. It was exactly where I’d left it—a lady in waiting for this purpose. “Did you check under all your pillows?” I asked.  Her hands swept the crumpled sheets. Raising the tiny brass disc for me to see, her innocent, toothless smile outshone the rising light of day.