See a penny...

This is the story of a woman who picks up pennies. Everywhere she goes she sees dropped and abandoned pennies and wherever she sees them she picks them up. She couldn’t say exactly when this started. She couldn’t link it directly to any dramatic event. They just very quietly started appearing, and, just as quietly, she started picking them up.  It isn't that she's particularly superstitious. She has often stepped on cracks and never broken her back. She has walked under many a ladder with no apparent ill effect. She has even, on one occasion, run over a black cat that happened to cross her path. The cat survived and so did she, going about her business seemingly no more or less lucky than before. There is, though, something about the pennies. She's a little furtive about picking them up. She waits until she thinks no one is looking. Or she pretends she has dropped something. She wouldn't like anyone to think she is retrieving them out of meanness, or necessity. She's not sure she'd like to explain why she does gather them. She knows they're not magic. There have been no significant changes in her life since the pennies entered it. She is no richer, no healthier, no more confident, no less sad. But just for a while after she has folded a new discovery into her fingers, a warm feeling gathers around her heart. She likes to imagine that the pennies have been put there especially for her. She likes to think that, somewhere, someone or something is sending her a message. She has no idea what the message might be but that's part of fun. The world seems a less a daunting place as she finds her way through it following her own winking, blinking trail of hope.