18. Peppers and pennies

Today's harvest:

1. Three bright red Jimmy Nardello peppers from the garden.

2. The curious phenomenon of coincidence that seems like more. For example, this morning, preparing to read something at a meeting tonight, I chose two paragraphs from Annie Dillard about finding pennies. Here's one of them.

I've been thinking about seeing. There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand. But — and this is the point — who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded with the site of a muskrat kit paddling from its den, will you ount that sight a chip of copper only, and go your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

Later in the day I was paying my fee at a parking lot, and there at my feet, in rainy grit beneath the payment box, were many wet pennies — 19 of them!

3. The lack of rotisserie chickens at the grocery, which made me do something I haven't done in a long time: Buy a raw chicken, which I will roast tomorrow and which will cense my home with aromas a rotisserie chicken couldn't hold a votive candle to.

4. The gift of a new pen. 

5. Every woman in the writing group that met for the first time tonight, and for the seeds planted and watered months ago that led to this promising sprouting.

What did your day yield? (Or, like the sold-out chickens, fail to yield that you ended up being glad about?)