I'm lost without pockets. I sometimes envy friends who wear tool belts or fishing type vests all the time because they have more pockets than I. Then I realize if I had more pockets I'd probably have more stuff and I already carry enough physical and emotional baggage wherever I go.
Almost every night I empty my pockets and try to sort out where things belong. There are usually scraps of paper with notes, often small stones or other bits of beauty my daughter or I have picked up off of the ground, and always there are coins.
I am probably a hoarder. I collect things I find interesting and I have always been interested in coins.
When I was a small child we would visit my grandparents' home in North Battleford. My grandpa had a huge stamp collection and my clearest image of him is hunched over a table with a magnifying glass in his hand. I'm sure he also had coins but the memories aren't as clear.
My dad had a jar of interesting coins in his sock drawer and when we were children he saved a few for each of us. I started collecting coins at a very early age. I kept the older coins and coins people brought me from other countries. I still get excited about the gift of a few coins carried home from an exotic location in someone else's pocket.
In recent years Canadian coins have become collector's items for me. I find it hard to leave the provincial and Olympic quarters in circulation and sometimes I find I have no money to spend because I have to save it. I know these coins aren't rare but they are interesting.
I'm also one of those people who picks up pennies and sometimes finds larger denominations of coins. I have dreams of following trails of quarters and loonies and remember my dad keeping such careful track of his earning and spending that he even wrote down the coins he found on his walk to work in the little book he carried in his pocket.
Pennies remind me of so many things and it will feel odd when they lose their place in the coin drawers. I know I won't forget them though. Every time I open a drawer or clean out a closet there they are. They come into my life every day and even when they aren't passed into my hand on a regular basis I'm sure I'll find enough to remind me I'm a lucky person.
