The Goods, Delivered to My Feet

I like to walk and I like to find things as I go. When we used to live on the East Side, I would often find money. The East Side was very good for loose change. The population is denser and many more people over there either go by foot or dig in their pockets for meter money, dropping it into snowbanks to be found weeks or months later by people like me, not above stooping down to pick up a dirty penny, even in the middle of the road.
One year I decided to conduct a little experiment. I began keeping track of exactly how much money I found, putting each month's cache into its own plastic film canister. I only found one piece of paper money that year, a single dollar bill in the road on Cramer Street near the engineering building on campus - I believe it was in March. Why I remember these things, I don't know. By the end of the year, I had eight dollars and fifty-eight cents, all in coins save the one dollar. Of course, my husband, in the span of the same year, found $5.00 outside our apartment building one morning and another $20.00 in front of the frame shop where he was working. Go figure.
I bring this up because this past week has been a very good one for finding things. First, I found a one-pound box of PrimeGuard phillips-head 3.5-inch exterior screws that were inadvertantly dropped and then run over by any number of vehicles in our alley right behind our house. I can use those. A few days later in the cemetary, I found a small, threaded brass finial, shaped like a chess pawn, shiny and heavy in the hand.
This morning, I found a 1 by 1.5-inch chunk of purple amethyst crystal by the sidewalk near the park. Certainly not an autochthonous gem, a child somewhere is missing her treasure.