The pebble rode in the coat pocket all winter before I found it. Gray, flat, a little smaller than a coin, with a white seam that went three-quarters of the way around and then quit. One face was smooth. The other kept a rough patch where it had broken off something larger, a long time before I got to it.
I did not decide to pick it up. That is the part I keep returning to. There was water, or maybe just wet gravel, and a wind that put my hands in my pockets, and at some point my hand closed around it and brought it home. A shore. A lot. The edge of some parking area with the lake past it, or the river. I cannot place the ground it came from.
It weighs almost nothing. I set it on the kitchen scale once and the needle barely lifted. It is colder than the room and stays cold longer than it should, the way stones do. When I hold it the cold goes into my palm, and then, slowly, my hand warms it, and it holds that warmth about as long as it had held the cold.
There is no label. No place stamped on it, no date, no gift shop it came through. Nothing about it says where. It is a stone that could be any stone, and that is exactly why I did not throw it out. A stone with a label would be a fact about a place. This one is a fact about a pocket. My hand chose it and my hand cannot say why.
It sits on the sill now. The white seam still stops where it stops.