Sam shows up in our bedroom a full hour and a half before his usual waking hour. He bounces on the creaky floorboards. "Daddy!" he stage-whispers. "Daddy! We're going to a Red Sox game tonight!" He's been to Fenway Park more times than I can count, but his first trip of the season is still a cause for celebration. "Get up, Daddy! This is going to be a great day!"

He is almost too excited to get dressed, jumping on the furniture, and on the back of his daddy's neck. He takes a brief look in his shirt drawer before letting out a howl. "Mama!" he yells. "Where's my Red Sox shirt?"

Did the Red Sox t-shirt from last year get tossed out the last time I checked his drawer for clothes that are too small? I frown at what's in front of me, the bin full of diapers, while mentally scratching my head. Finally I yell back, "I'm not sure. It might be too small for you. I'll help you look for it as soon as I get your sister changed."

Sam skids into his sister's room, hyperventilating slightly. "How come my Red Sox shirt is too small?" he pants.

"I'm not sure if it's too small or not. I can't remember whether it's a 2T or a 2-4 size." I try to model calm acceptance, to radiate the peaceful certainty that life will continue to be worth living even if the Red Sox t-shirt has already left the house in a pile of clothes bound for the nearest charity. "Let me wash my hands and then I'll help you look for it."

He follows me into the bathroom wearing half his fuzzy pajamas. "But Mama," he says anxiously, "if my shirt is too small, then we can save it for Miriam to wear when she's bigger."

"Good idea," I say, drying my hands on the towel and resisting the urge to slap myself on the forehead. He feels better about giving up childish things if he can pass them onto his baby sister, and enjoy them secondhand for awhile longer. But plenty of his old clothes have already been quietly given away, discarded, or otherwise declared unsuitable for Miriam, prancing around now in her purple flowered playsuit. Could the Red Sox t-shirt be among them?

I catch myself hyperventilating slightly in sympathy with the small boy shadowing my footsteps down the hall. It's not just that I'm worried about disappointing him, though. I feel guilty about all those other clothes smuggled out of the house. I'd hang onto them all myself for 20 years if I could, packing and stacking them all as tangible evidence of each stage of childhood as it rushes past. But my own fiercely possessive nostalgia is tempered both by our lack of closet space, and by my grim determination to wrest control of my desire to preserve every scrap of memory. I have for myself a set of goals: I will not become a pack rat, building bulwarks of stuff against the ticking hands of time. I will not fear that the future will leave me bereft of memories of these years. I will learn how to trust that tomorrow will also bring its share of happiness. And most of all, I will find Sam's Red Sox t-shirt.

Sam keeps chattering while I make my guilty way to the dresser and sink to my knees in front of the bottom drawer. There are tie-dyed t-shirts, shirts with stripes, shirts from every tourist town my mother has entered in the past three years. But there, stained slightly pinkish from my risky laundering habits, is Sam's Red Sox t-shirt. It fits, barely. His jeans are too big – the belt that holds them up leaves excess waistband puckering around his waist. He looks a little like Ed Grimley, and he thinks his outfit is perfect.

I get his socks out of the top drawer. Most of Sam's wardrobe are gifts from a generous grandmother with traditionally gendered taste in clothing. There are lots of aggressively dull navy blues, brick reds, and army greens – all printed with motorcycles or dump trucks or dinosaurs. He doesn't mind the prints, but he craves vibrant colors. So socks are one item of clothing in which Sam has been able to gleefully throw gendered caution to the winds. At the sock racks at Old Navy, he has picked socks of every shade: navy blue, yes, but also delicate lavender, daisy yellow, bright red, and a salmon-like pale orange. He treasures his socks; they are a delight to him.

This batch of socks is almost two years old now. The socks have seen hard and faithful duty. One by one, they have fallen to holes and the mysterious crevices of the laundry machines. Many of them were replaced – oh, the disappointment! – by a cheap bag of multiple pairs of white athletic socks. But there is still a pair of brilliant red socks here in the drawer. I pull them out for him.

"Red socks for the Red Sox, Mama!" He looks at me like I am the most wonderful mother in the world while we tug the socks over his feet. But as he scrunches them down over his ankles just the way he likes them, he notices a worn spot that's just become a hole. "Oh no! Look, Mama!"

We agree that a different pair of socks is in order. I find another pair, white with a few red stripes. I take the old red socks. "I guess it's time to throw these guys away," I say.

Sam gasps. I look up. He is blinking rapidly, his long lashes veiling his brown eyes.

"Oh, sweetheart," I say.

"I'm not sad," he says, still blinking. From what mysterious cultural ether has he already learned to deny the feelings that besiege him?

I touch his hand lightly. "Are you sad about the socks?" I ask.

Tears begin to slip out of his eyes and down his cheeks. His face crumples.

I fold him into an enormous hug while his sister tugs at the edges of the hole in the sock. After I've kissed his forehead ten or fifteen times, I say softly, "It's hard to grow up sometimes, isn't it?"

He lifts his head from my shoulder. "Well, it's hard when you miss something that you love."

"Like your old red socks?"

He sniffs bravely. "Yeah. Mama, I think I have to wear those socks to the game tonight. Because they're red, and it's the Red Sox."

"OK," I say. We solemnly change his socks yet again.

"Mama, when I'm done with these socks, I want you to save them for Miriam, for when she's bigger."

"OK," I say again. I try not to let him see my lips twitch while I wonder what, exactly, he thinks his sister would do with a pair of old red socks with holes. Does he think she will be beset by waves of nostalgia for his childhood, just like he is – just like I am? I suppress the urge to smugly inform him that Miriam will have her own pairs of hole-ridden memories, her own discards to cling to. What do I know, really? Who knows what she will value tomorrow or next week or next year? Maybe her brother's old red socks are just what she needs to hasten her journey out of babyhood – maybe those red socks could become the mythical snuggly bedtime transitional object that would allow her to fall asleep without me lying next to her, one or more of her little fingers scritching gently at my belly button.

I look Sam in the eye again. "Maybe would you like to go buy some new red socks next week?"

"Maybe," he says.

Maybe. Maybe we'll buy him some new red socks in a larger size, and new yellow and orange and purple ones, too. Maybe he'll love them so much that he'll forget all about the previous socks worn out and outgrown. Maybe his little sister will get to go to her first Red Sox game with the guys – wearing her brother's hand-me-down baseball jacket, a butterfly cap, and a pair of pink-flowered sneakers – and become an even more excited fan than her brother. And maybe I'll finally resign myself to the loss of all these little mementoes, the shirts and socks, an endless fabric collage of childhood. How I wish I could save them all, folded lovingly into a cluttered keepsake box with a bunch of faded ticket stubs. And a pair of hole-ridden red socks.