The Pennies in My Gravel Driveway
I counted out fifty and they made a stack about three inches high, and I stood there doing math with my lips moving like my grandmother used to.
Ninety-one thousand five hundred pennies. Fifty to a roll. That was eighteen hundred and thirty rolls. A penny weighs about two and a half grams, so the whole pile was somewhere around five hundred pounds.
Five hundred pounds of copper in my driveway, and I had a Malibu with a bad wheel bearing that Dale had been promising to fix for a month.
I drove into Rhinelander with a coffee can full of pennies on the seat beside me to see what my choices were.
The grocery store had one of those big green coin machines by the door, and I read the sign twice.
Eleven point nine percent. On nine hundred and fifteen dollars, that was almost a hundred and nine dollars, gone. That was a week of groceries for us.
The credit union in town is open until noon on Saturdays. The teller there, a young woman who went to school with my cousin, said they would gladly take them if they were rolled and clean. Loose, no. Dirty, definitely no.
“How many wrappers do you need?” she asked.
“Eighteen hundred and thirty,” I said.
She gave me every wrapper they had in the back, and I bought the rest at the Walmart.
Then I stopped at the dollar store for four bottles of blue dish soap, a dish tub, a bag of rags and two pairs of yellow rubber gloves in a child’s size that were really meant for gardening.
When I got home, Ken from across the road was standing at the end of my driveway with his hands in the pockets of his barn coat, looking at the pile.
Ken drove plow for the county for thirty-one years. He is seventy-four and has a gray mustache that he combs, and he and his wife, Marie, had watched my kids from their porch more times than I could count.
“I saw him do it,” Ken said. “Yesterday. I was out getting the mail.” He shook his head slowly. “I’ve known Dale Heckert forty years. I never would have believed it.”
“Me either,” I said.
He looked at the dish tub and the gloves in my arms. “You’re going to roll it,” he said.
“I am.”
“All of it.”
“Every single one.”
He nodded like I had told him I was going to split a cord of wood, which is to say like it was a big job, but a reasonable one.
Then he went back across the road, and ten minutes later he came back carrying a card table and two folding chairs.
That was how it started. That is the picture I still carry when I think of that spring.
The afternoon sun on the gravel. The pines across the road going gold at the tops.
An old patchwork quilt we used for picnics spread out on the gravel at the edge of the drive, and my two children sitting on it with a dish tub of soapy water between them.
I tied my hair up in a bandana.
I had on a gray T-shirt and my oldest jeans, and I knelt in the gravel beside the pile with a stack of paper wrappers and started counting.
Noah and Lily scooped pennies into the tub with plastic cups. They swished them around in the hot soapy water, then fished them out and laid them on old bath towels to dry.