With love for Mark on his birthday.

The small silver ring on my left baby finger is a mute reproach to my one regret in life. The enamel heart is slightly chipped and the scrolls are tarnished.

The ring once shone inside a gold plastic ball, my son’s Christmas gift to me. Too small for my ring finger and too big for my pinkie, when the last carol faded, the heart-ring had ended up in a box on my dresser.

I remembered it once a year. Each ornament on our tree has a history, and when we came to the gold plastic ball, Mark would half-joke about the ring I didn’t wear. He once said that as he chose each gift, he imagined his loved-ones’ happy faces when they opened them. Yet their faces were never as bright as he hoped. The tarnished ring fell into that gift-giving category.

The clean scent of pines remind me of those Christmases, and I began wearing the ring about a year and a half after my son died. A gift given with love always fits.