JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

At the county Fair last week I bought the girls cotton candy from a cart where sno cone syrups waited in rows beside the bags of blue and pink. Cotton candy is a commodity. At $2.50 an ounce, a pound would sell for $40, and probably all profit, since the ingredients are sugar and food coloring. I was surprised that calories are only 114 for the bag, the size of a small pillow. Perhaps there could even be a Cotton Candy Diet.

I allowed the girls to choose one treat from the offerings at the fair, and they wanted the pink sticky stuff. Of course, they didn’t know it was sticky. They had no idea what was inside the bag. Or why it was called cotton candy.

Once they started, they were addicted. We ate half the bag sitting on a bench and brought the other half home for dessert. Even Elisabeth liked it, leaving pink fingerprints on the backpack. I think it had been years since I had tasted the stuff myself. It feels soft and strange, like thick synthetic filling, but with a tug and a taste it vanishes into nothing, leaving only pink fingers and tongues behind as testimony.

Such a sugary symbol of summer. At the beginning it seems huge, more than you can imagine. The more you enjoy it, the faster it disappears. And soon you find yourself in September, licking the last bits of pink stickiness from your fingers, wondering where it all went.