Lucky

[gallery ids="3129,3130,3126"] I found a quarter and a beer bottle on yesterday's head-clearing walk around the block. Not only did I get a bit of exercise, but I also made 35 cents to boot. Win, all around.

[Yes, I tend to collect (and then return to the beer store) the random liquor and beer bottles that fairly regularly show up on my walks around the neighbourhood, because I’m 70 years old and classy like that. And cheap. It’s just hard for me not to pick them up. It feels like a waste to pass by what could so easily be turned into money, what would otherwise end up smashed and twisted in the gutters.]

For a while, when I was a kid, I saved all my lucky coins. I stored them — pennies, dimes, nickels, quarters — in a small tin container in my bottom desk drawer, just in case I ever needed to cash in on some huge wish.

Looking back, it seems simultaneously like a brilliant and pitiful idea — a 10-year-old girl, hoarding wishes, wondering how to spend them. I should write a novel about that. I knew enough to know that the wishes weren’t literal, but somehow, the idea of a pile of "lucky" coins was potent. I should have bought a lottery ticket. That would’ve made a good story.

I don’t know what I finally wished on, or even if I wished at all. I don’t know what happened to the money. Do you have to spend lucky pennies for the wishes to apply? Are they lucky for someone else right now?

At least the snow is melting, ushering us into spring. I've become one of those Thunder Bay people I used to make fun of, the kind who redistributes the snow on the front lawn in order for it to melt faster, more evenly. But at least, the snow is melting, uncovering garbage and dog shit and beer bottles and lucky quarters.

These days, I pay Isaac a penny for each Rainbow Loom elastic that he collects from the floors and puts back in his case — it occupies him, tidies the house, gets him a bit of spending money (for more elastics) and uses up some of the change in my pocket. Win, all around.