Untitled
By Helen Lewis
Response
Old Money
By Michelle Vanstrom
Inspiration piece
When I bought the old
coins my mother collected
I always thought I’d give them
back. She called it
collateral for the mortgage
money, or else she wouldn’t
ask and she refused a coin
collector’s large offer
because, she promised, one
day she would buy them
back. I followed her into the bedroom
where she kept them
buried in the floor’s cold
air return inside an ancient suitcase
with broken gold clasps. She placed her eighteen-year
collection into my arms and burdened them
with memories—us searching
for edge-worn faces, tiny minted letters stamped
on silver, D for Denver, S for San Francisco
and scanning bills, ones and fives, marked
with red ink—a trait not normally found
on George or Abraham but always imprinted on us. Small
change always found our hands,
luck discovered in a supermarket parking lot, the gas station,
or the high school cafeteria. Every Friday she bought rolled
coins instead of cigarettes, exchanged
Salems for lucky strikes. After supper
at the dining room table we sat and scrutinized, peering
through blue smoke and
dreams with a magnifying glass
for the rare discovery: bronze Indian heads,
copper wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes,
Liberty walking halves, or a peace
silver dollar, pressing them into the empty
dated spaces in the green coin collection
books. I bound the blue suitcase with straw-colored masking
tape and I buried it in my storage
closet preserving her memory
and her broken gold clasp promise.
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