The Children's Museum here has a special section for the youngest guests. Visitors walk in their sock feet across a floor soft as marshmallows, treading carefully around crawlers and toddlers stumbling around in barely controlled falls. There is a gentleness here, and a thrum of joy from adults still fresh in love with their new roles.
Stylized trees rise from green carpet here, and a creek is worked blue into the floor. Of course, where water "runs" there must be a wooden bridge to cross. The one here is small and flat and marked at the corners by seat-stumps.
Lying down across the bridge, I close my eyes. Hidden in the stumps are speakers, and the slightest movement elicits cascades of recorded giggles and laughter. Over and over again the peals gurgle quietly down the creek, and soon I am grinning.
My children are now too big for the museum. Still, on blue days, I can close my eyes and my heart lifts with delight at remembered joy.