The Little Bottle of Nickels

The Man Who Puts Up With me left the world of over the road trucking, set down his several boxes and bags of "stuff" from his truck, and never looked back.

Somehow they were mysteriously supposed to put themselves away, I guess.  Slowly I've been sifting through his bags, or the bags of grocery goods and finding slots here and there for these cans of vegetables, or canned pasta, blankets and spray bottles of cleaning fluid, dirty shirts and towels.  Every time I walk into our bedroom I find something else to put away. 

So when I ran across a pill bottle lying on the floor, I shook it,opened it an found a handful of nickels.  I could understand a container of quarters since he often needed them to take care of toll road payments when he was traveling.  But nickels? 

Now I have to admit that my first reaction was that hubby was keeping a bunch of money set aside for some specific purpose.  My thoughts immediately flashed to stories of women who squirreled away money so that she might one day be free. 

Then there was always the Ole an Lena joke that goes a bit like this: Ole comes home a bit early from work one day.  In his desire to get a quick bite to eat, he starts snooping through the cupboards.  To his astonishment, he finds twenty jars of dried beans. 

Lena walks into the door a minute later and greets her husband.  "Well, you're home early!"

"yes," says Ole.  "I yust was looking for a little snack vhen I found this here bunch of beans.  Now howcome you got so many jars of beans up here?"

Her eyes dropped a bit.  "Vell, now I have a little bit of good news and some bad news for ya dere., Ole, you see, it was like dis.  Every time I was unfaithful to you, I put a little bean on that there jar."

Ole looks over the jars and then looks at Lena very sadly.  "Vhat's the good news?" he asks.

Lena brightened considerably.  "Vell, I sold fifty bushesl vhen the price was way up!"

For some reason, that little jar of nickels reminded me of that story.  So when The Man Who Puts Up With Me got home, I asked him. "What are you doing?  Collecting money so you can run away?  I can always just give you the money for that!"

He frowned, thinking.  "I doubt I'll get far on a dozen nickels." But I could see he had no idea what I was talking about, so I quickly retrieved them from the bedroom.

"Oh, those are yours!" he said.

"Mine?"  I didn't remember any nickels in a pill bottle.

"Yeah, you said they were silver or something. I got tired of them lying around so I put them in that thing."

My eyes flashed wide and I quickly checked it out.  Sure enough, every one of them were made before the government added a new  plating on them. Thank goodness I hadn't just tossed them into my purse.  

"Well, so much for my blog fodder," I joked.  "You were my blog fodder!"

"Ha! Your blog fodder?"  he laughed.  "Now you'll have to go fpdder yourself!"

We laughed at the sillinss of "Go fodder yourself!"  and then I got to thinking.  We have lived together so long, that we can laugh at things like this together. I don't have to worry that he'll collect so many nickels that he will someday run off with the floosy next door. And he doesn't have to worry that I have a stash of beans.