There is nothing new about the human impulse to assign meaning to inanimate things. Engagement rings are promises and stories instead of metal and stones; religious icons transport; pieces of clothing are deemed lucky; Grandfather's old chair is declared to have a soul. The material is always an eager understudy for the emotional, willing to step onstage and fill a role that a person or spiritual idea has recently occupied; we people, by ourselves, can never fulfill one another's most naked needs all the time.

Children are innately practical -- perhaps their common adoption of stuff they can hold on to in place of our hands and bodies is just the first step in a lifelong dance with the power of objects. That we, as parents, are complicit in this is evidence that we understand our own shortcomings. Unless we are kangaroos, or members of those oft-cited tribes who don't remove their offspring from their chests until they can walk off on their own, we're probably going to have to call upon the understudies at some point. Enter pacifier, pillow, stuffed hippo, stage left. The twist I hadn't expected, which revealed itself in Green Pillow's absence, was that I had assigned the same level of symbolic value to a childhood security object as my daughter had. He had become a repository of comfort and memory for me, too. He embodied my daughter's innocence somehow -- and, admittedly, her need of me. He marked our passage together into the world, as mother and child. Green Pillow had been there at all the important junctures, had had pee, snot, tears, and blood laundered out of him, time after time. The physical loss of him represented the potential loss of nothing less than an era, and of my role as a caregiver. No wonder I couldn't sleep.

Having been lost on a Friday, Green Pillow turned up on a Monday, at a restaurant in the seaside town we were visiting (the place had been closed all weekend). After a jubilant phone call confirming his whereabouts, I tore down to the docks in my car, ran in, and claimed him.

I planned to rush him home and surprise Amelia, but first I ran into two women with older kids outside, whom I knew only a little from former vacations in the town. I realize, in retrospect, what a picture of insanity I must have made, saying hello and exchanging the usual superficial pleasantries, all the while pressing a dingy pillow against my cheek. I can't remember whether I explained what I was doing holding and stroking this raggedy pile of fabric while trying to carry on my end of the conversation, or the leap of joy I made from the top step down to the sidewalk once we'd said our goodbyes. In my excitement, I suspect I didn't.

Amelia was ecstatic when she saw him. She flung herself at Green Pillow, clutching him tighter than I had, and closed her eyes, breathing him in. Then she trotted across the yard with him in hand, just like always. I'm not naive enough to think of this as the end of the story, though. If those brief and eternal hours between lost and found taught me anything, it's that my days of stepping back and letting the tiny relinquish ments that are such a natural part of my child's -- and my -- growth happen are only beginning. As the lyric that blared from the radio during the groovy era in which I sucked my thumb and clutched my own quilt goes: The first cut is the deepest. Losses, great and small, will accrue in my relationship with Amelia and in her life as it gathers time and heft and assumes a trajectory of its own: losses of innocence and the various childhood totems that, during their glorious, abbreviated runs, seemed to matter most.

Next time one of these losses occurs, I'll try not to freak out, and will most likely fail. For now, I'll enjoy the reprieve that the reappearance of Green Pillow has given us, and try to remember that there are certain things we can't hold on to forever, that we will eventually lose. This fall, Amelia enters kindergarten, and you might see me at some point outside her school, a fuzzy greenish-grayish square of cotton and satin dangling from my hand. Green Pillow, I love you, buddy. We'll get through it together, as best we can.

Heather Clay's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, and her first novel will be published later this year by Knopf. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

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