It smacked me in the nose as I entered the side door, hauling books and briefcase, home at the end of my work day.  I dropped everything on the kitchen table and, led by the almost visible aroma like a cartoon character, proceeded to the powder room.

The toilet seat was up.  No surprise – I was the lone woman in a household of males.  But along the rim of the porcelain bowl was a garland of pale yellow curlicues.  Turning my eye to the sink, I noted a similar pattern around its perimeter, a suitably rococo frame for the symmetrical sunburst of hand cream emanating from the drain.  The creative genius’s medium reposed to one side of the soap dish – a large bottle of Jergen’s fitted with a plastic pump.

There was no doubt as to who the artist was.  At the bottom of the hall steps, I called out my younger child’s name.  When Michael appeared on the landing, all faded jeans and blond bangs, I was too choked with laughter to speak.  I gestured for him to join me downstairs and led him to the bathroom.

When I was able to squeeze out a word, I asked my darling seven-year-old, “Why?” knowing there was no answer that would withstand adult logic.

“The toilet had dry skin?” he ventured, between giggles.  As we laughed at that absurdity, he added, “I know – clean it up.”  I nodded, tears streaming down my face, and fetched a roll of paper towels for him.

Although I wasn’t there, I can tell you exactly what happened.  I knew this child.  He’d used the facilities and was washing his hands when the lotion dispenser caught his eye.  Pushing down on the pump once, he pushed again.  And again.  Lost in the motion and the resulting ribbons of pale yellow, he was overtaken by possibility.  He simply moved into the moment and worked with the materials at hand.

Once I left this child in the car – for only a few minutes, I swear – in the library parking lot, while I returned a load of books.  Skilled to a fault at amusing himself, my son excavated the glove compartment and found the green stamps our gas station used to give out.  In the time it took me to pay the overdue fines, he stuck the stamps in a sort of checkerboard manner on the right half of the windshield.  It took him a good deal longer to scrape them off with a plastic putty knife.

A similar but less benign opus, during what I now think of as Mike’s paper mosaic period, was installed on the sliding glass doors of our family room early one morning.  Coming down to make coffee, I saw that the egress to our yard was festooned with his older brother’s beloved baseball cards.  He’d used Elmer’s glue.  In this case, I couldn’t make him rectify the situation unaided, since nothing less than a razor blade would get the cards off.  Mike’s brother, convinced to this day that he’d have a fortune if only he could sell those old cards on Ebay, has never quite forgiven him.