Gathering Glass

My parents used to take Jenny and me to the U.P. just past the paper mill and before the Porcupine Mountains, to walk along the beaches of Lake Superior, the same place where they rented a cabin for their honeymoon.

While our parents shuffled along behind, we ran ahead kicking the water with our feet and gathering stones from the piles that lined the shoreline just under an inch of polar-cold water. Our pockets bulged and two dark circles formed from the wet stones inside, so that we looked like we had growths on each hip.

I remember bending over and retrieving a very bright green stone, the size of a large marble that had pierced my toe. I rubbed the stone between my wet palms, smooth like a very worn quarter on both sides, and when I brought it to my eyes like a single spectacle, it was clear—my parents turned green.

Jenny and I would fight over these clear white and green stones, especially the green ones for one reason: there weren’t many of them. To find one was like catching that faint look between our parents that said, “Yes, yes, we are in love” even though they weren’t much for hugging or kissing. But they had those once-in-a-while-looks, a glance that let us know it was "good."

It wasn’t until many years later that I found out that those clear white and green stones that we had fought over, the ones we thought must have come from a different world, where nothing more than pieces of glass from bottles fishermen had tossed into the lake that had been worn and worn again and again by the waves that lapped them a shore.

But that look between my parents, though few like those stones, was something out of this world. Even when they had and have worn and stretched each other down, they still find that look, that love.