A piece of Sky

That sea glass kept coming back to her

Entry for:"The Writer's Cramp"  April 7, 2026

The fog was thick that morning. The waves sounded soft, like someone whispering. I've walked this beach in Northern California for forty-seven years. First as a little girl with my grandpa. Then as a mom. Now as a grandma myself.

That morning, I wasn't finding much. Just the usual white and green glass. I put them in my grandpa's old tobacco tin. He taught me how to look for sea glass when I was small.

"Not the sharp ones, honey," he'd say. "The sea already made these soft. Now they just want to be found."

He was a fisherman. He loved the ocean more than anything. When he died, I threw his ashes into the waves. The next day, the sea gave me back three pieces of green glass. I still have them.

I was thinking about him when I saw it.

A piece of blue glass. Cobalt blue. Half-buried in the wet sand.

My heart stopped. In forty-seven years, I had never found blue glass. My grandpa only found two pieces in his whole life. He said blue glass was a piece of sky that fell in love with the ocean.

I got down on my knees. My old knees hurt, but I didn't care. I brushed the sand away.

It was tiny. Smaller than a dime. And so smooth. No sharp edges. Just that pretty, deep blue. Like the sky right after the sun goes down.

I held it up. Light shone through it. And right then, I knew where it came from.

1956 – Bodega Bay

My grandma Rosa had a blue glass vase on her kitchen window. It was from Italy. Her mother gave it to her. She kept it in the window because she loved how the light looked through it.

One day, my uncle Tommy was just three years old. He wanted to see the vase. He reached up and pulled it down. It smashed on the floor. A hundred little blue pieces everywhere.

Grandma Rosa didn't yell. She just sighed. She swept up the pieces and walked to the cliff behind the house.

"Back to the sea," she said. And she threw them all into the water.

My grandpa was on his boat that day. He never knew. But the ocean took those pieces. For sixty-eight years, the waves rolled them. The sand smoothed them. Most of them broke into tiny bits and disappeared.

But one piece did not disappear.

It kept going. Year after year. Storm after storm. The ocean held it and made it soft. Made it beautiful.

Now

I closed my hand around the little blue glass. I thought about Grandma Rosa's kitchen. I thought about my grandpa. I thought about my own daughter who lives in the city now and never comes to the beach anymore.

I put the blue piece in my mouth to warm it. That's an old habit. Then I put it in the tin with the others.

When I got home, I wrote my daughter a letter. I told her about the blue glass. I told her it came all the way from 1956. From her great-grandma's vase.

I asked her to come home next summer.

She said yes.

Total:539 words