People often ask where the little rocks come from. The honest answer is: a lot of driving, and a lot of walking with her head down.
A few times a year Donna loads up the car and heads west — out toward Vancouver Island and up the coast toward places like Prince Rupert and Terrace. The good stones aren’t the ones you notice first. They’re the flat, palm-worn pebbles that have spent a few hundred years being turned over by the water until the edges are gone and the colours have settled into soft greys, greens, and rusty browns.
She looks for faces before they’re faces — a rounded stone that already looks like it’s leaning into a hug, a sliver of driftwood with the right bend for an arm, a chip of frosted sea glass the exact green of a winter coat. Everything comes home in buckets, gets rinsed and sorted on the workbench, and waits there until the right piece finds the right home.
So when a little rock family arrives at your door, it’s carrying a bit of the coast with it — the actual shoreline, gathered by hand, a long way from Alberta.