He beamed at her. “You helped my dad find my Darth Vader minifig when I lost it at the party. I was so sad and I thought it was gone forever. My dad said you are the one who first saw it in the grass and that you looked for a long time.”
Rosie’s expression softened with pleasure. “That is really kind of you. I can’t wait to see what you made.”
He beamed with pride as he handed over the small bundle. Andrew wanted to tell her to keep her expectations low, but he would never say anything to hurt his son’s feelings.
He had to hope she could understand the emotion behind the gift. Something told him Rosie was the kind of person who would never denigrate a child’s offering, no matter how humble it might be.
As he had hoped, she unwrapped the bundle as if it were a priceless antique. When she saw the misshapen clay trivet Finn had made, embedded with shells they had picked up on the beach, her features lit up.
“It’s beautiful,” she exclaimed. “How did you know I needed exactly this in my kitchen?”
Finn beamed. “I didn’t know. I just made it. We found those shells ourselves. Since they were broken, my dad said we could keep them.”
“I love the way you made them in a circle around the edge. That’s very creative.”
“I made one, too,” Zara said. “Dad’s going to keep mine. It’s bigger, but I don’t think my shells looked as good as Finn’s did.”
He wanted to hug his daughter for going out of her way to praise her younger brother. As annoyed as Zara could sometimes get with Finn, she loved him and would be the first to protect and defend him.
“What are you doing?” Zara asked. “Why are you pulling up your plants?”
“I’m not. I’m pulling up the weeds. They are starting to take over because of the rain. I want to plant some new flowers in my beds, but I have to get the weeds out first.”
His children looked so intrigued by the process, he had towonder if he had never weeded with his children. The answer came easily. No. When would he have? In California, they had lived in a gated neighborhood where the grounds were taken care of by a company. Tracy had kept flower baskets but she had been too frail to do much gardening the last year of her life.
“Where is Dottie?” Finn asked.
“I’m afraid she’s not here. My daughter and granddaughter took her for an adventure today. They were going on a hike to Hidden Beach. Have you been there yet?”
“No,” Andrew said. “Never heard of it.”
“Oh, you need to take the kids someday. It’s about a mile hike from the trailhead, and then you come to a beach that very few people go to. You usually have it mostly to yourself, with only two or three other people. If you hike down the beach another half mile or so, you’ll find a beach that has the most magnificent sea glass.”
“Why?” Finn asked, his favorite word.
“It’s a long story but a long time ago, people threw their trash over the side of a cliff nearby and down to the beach. The beach has been cleaned up but over time the ocean has taken all the glass from those bottles and jars and smoothed it over to make sea glass.”
“So the sea glass is garbage?” Zara asked.
“Some of it might have started that way. But now it’s like beautiful, colorful stones.”
“Can we go there?” she asked Andrew with a pleading look. “Our art teacher said we could make another trivet at home and put sea glass in it instead of shells. She gave us the directions in our packet.”
“That does sound fun,” he said. “Not today, though. We’re on a bike ride now, going to Orca Park.”
Zara’s features fell. “I’d rather go find sea glass. Can’t we do that instead?”
He really needed to work on teaching his daughter to embrace the present instead of always looking ahead. He feared that was a habit she had picked up during her mother’s illness. They were always looking toward the next doctor’s visit, the next surgery, the next chemotherapy treatment.
He needed to remind himself of that, too. His children were growing up far too quickly and he needed to savor days like this.
“Can we help you plant your flowers before we go to the park?” Finn asked Rosie.
Rosie sent Andrew a quick look, and he could tell she was gauging what he wanted her to say. He supposed they could plant a few flowers if his kids would enjoy it.
He gave her a noncommittal shrug, and she smiled at the kids.
“You want to plant flowers instead of going to the park?”