The Countless Coins

When I was young we would go to Wilmington, NC to visit my father’s mother.   My grandma lived in an old, creaky house that managed to be warm and inviting in some areas while being dark and scary in others.    There were rooms that were never opened, food in the refrigerator that looked like it had been wedged into the back for years and old, unknown things in corners of rooms that were exciting to an inquisitive young child.

I’m sure the house had been painted at some point, but the amount of paint flaking off seemed to be more than what was holding on.   I spent a lot of time looking at the paint because there was a front porch swing and I loved swinging.   There was a massive, old tree in her side yard.   As an adult I can appreciate the majesty of that tree (which lives only in my memory) because there were huge branches going all across the whole of the side and back yard.   The trunk itself must have easily had a diameter of seven feet.    And those branches, oh the branches.   It was a tree climber’s dream.  I spent many fun summers days at my grandmother’s home where she raised my father and aunt.

My grandmother had several siblings.   One of them lived across the side street from her house.   I didn’t go over there much as it was more on the scary side of houses than the interesting kind.   I do have one particular memory of their house though, and that was of the coins.

I was too young to have any interest in money myself, but I did know what money was, especially coins.   We went over to my great uncle and aunt’s house one time for a dinner or something because I was there for a while and I got to wandering around.    I had noticed there were some containers with coins in them in the main room and didn’t think too much about it.   But when I went to one of the rooms off from the living room, I didn’t expect to see buckets and bins full of coins, arranged in somewhat haphazard manner, taking up a lot of the floor space in the room.   There weren’t as many containers in the other areas of the main floor, but when I got to looking I notices more vats of money in other places I hadn’t seen initially.

As an adult I would have been intrigued.  I would have wanted to know just how much money a bucket full of nickels or dimes or quarters was worth (they were organized by kind.)   I would also have been interested enough to have to go and ask what was up with all the money, in clearly non-trivial quantities, left unattended around the house.   As a child, I was too shy to ask.

Later, when I had come home after my week’s visit, I asked my father about the coin mystery.  He said it was because they owned a laundromat and the coins were from their machines.   So the mystery of the money’s source was solved.  But why were they all over the house and not deposited in a bank, getting back into general circulation and taking dramatically less floorspace up?   Was my uncle distrustful of banks?   Did he hate rolling coins to deposit them?   Or did he enjoy being surrounded by the success of his business?   I may never know.    Maybe my father does.

The Big Boy Update:  At dinner tonight my mother-in-law saw a brindle-colored greyhound dog and said, “look at that beautiful dog.”  My son looked over and said, “no, he’s dirty.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We were on the highway after lunch today, heading out of town for a weekend’s vacation.   My daughter asked from the back seat, “are we going lemon speed?”   My husband told her that yes, we were going the speed limit.

Fitness Update:  Okay, four one-tenth mile runs with seven pound weights in each hand doesn’t sound like much of a killer workout but this morning I asked my husband to bring me the Advil to the bed, because I didn’t want to get up to get it.