I smile. Besides gardening, my mom’s passion was collecting rocks and stones from Lake Michigan’s shoreline. I grab a cup of coffee and pull a coat on over my robe as I head out the front door and onto the screened porch. I set my coffee onto an old log my parents used as an end table and yank down the plastic sheets I still have hanging over the screens. A cold breeze ruffles the screens, and they seem to sigh in happiness at their newfound freedom. I grab my coffee and take a seat on the barn-red glider.

“Hello!” I say into the morning air as the cold of the glider makes its way through my coat, robe and pajamas. “Still March in Michigan.”

I take a sip of coffee and exhale, just as the screens had done. My breath stops in front of my face, freeze-framed for just a moment, then—poof!—it’s gone.

The lakeshore is silent this morning, muffled by the snow that remains. But the cold air makes any noise sound even louder, from the chirp of the cardinals to the squirrels foraging on frozen ground. The lake is already beginning to unfreeze, and a ring of blue-green rims the shoreline, where the melting ice has turned the water the color of the Caribbean. From my vantage point, I can see the arc of the lakeshore as far as the eye can see, beyond South Haven.

“You are so beautiful,” I say aloud, my breath hovering in white clouds. I watch it slowly dissipate, and my gaze becomes focused on the immediate: the rocks and stones my mom and I gathered over the decades line the wooden ledges of the screened porch. There are hundreds of rocks, and beyond the dust and cobwebs that have accumulated, I can see each stone’s beauty. I can remember the exact moment when and the exact reason why we selected each rock.

We collected the beach glass in 7-Up greens, root beer brown and elusive blue because of its frosty beauty and the hunt itself. It took hours of beachcombing to find a few fragments.

We gathered small, round chunks of granite that we called “bird eggs” because of their shape and beautiful, bright speckled colors.

Leland blues and Petoskey stones—fossilized coral, deposited in Michigan by glaciers, that is the state stone—were collected on our girls’ trips to northern Michigan. A rare trip to Lake Superior one summer resulted in endless agates, made up of quartz, reddened by iron and deposited in layers to create concentric circles resembling rings inside a tree in colors straight from a sunset.

My mom and I collected any stone shaped like a heart because of its symbolism.

And we would rush to the beach after every summer thunderstorm hoping to find fulgurite, petrified lightning that is formed when lightning strikes the sand and fuses its grains together.