Floor Pennies

By Berni B.

Biddy always had a smile to share with me over a cup of tea and was forever asking a penny for my thoughts. I never refused her and always took the penny for toffee/candy, then told her what about the doings and goings on inside my head. Biddy has been dead for a long time, but whenever I see an old penny, I am reminded of those cups of tea in her herbed and spiced kitchen and our conversations by the fire.

Today, I found a penny on the pavement outside my front gate and was reminded of a long ago happening and a little Biddy bit of Biddy and her philosophy. She would say, "Floor pennies come from Heaven and are angel gifts. When an angel visits you, they leave a penny gift for your thoughts.

I was stranded a long way from home in a strange town with my belongings and wallet stolen and no money to get home with. I remember walking down a winter's street in the early hours with my head bowed to the floor, stone cold to the bone. England is a cold place at the best of times, but that early morning, frost bite was a killer and I was going down in the grips of hypothermia.

Suddenly, along that lamp-lit street, I was chasing a twenty pound note that had blown across my path. I chased it up ways and across, then around a corner, down a flight of steps and into an all night cafe with a flashing neon sign that said, "WELCOME". Here I was able to get myself sorted with hot food, a borrowed coat and, afterwards, the midnight bus back home with change to spare.

In Biddy's day, there were two hundred and forty pennies to the Pound, but with decimalization of the currency, there are now one hundred, so the math is a little easier for me. I reckon that night, 2,000 angels visited me just as Biddy said they do.

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