“A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned” — Scottish Proverb
Sandra stepped out of her work and into the sunshine. She collected her penny from the dispensary next door.
Giving her penny a roll, she started for home.
The first block was a piece of cake; the penny rolled along at the flick of her wrist.
The second block required removal of gloves and a firm push to roll one turn after another.
The third block meant putting her high heels into her purse and putting on her tennis shoes to shove the penny with her shoulder round after round.
At the forth block Sandra gave up on pushing the penny, removed her penny pack from her purse, and hoisted the penny onto her back.
She carried the penny for block five and six, but the seventh block brought last ditch efforts. She pulled from her purse her ice tongs, clamped them onto the edge of the penny and dragged the coin to her street.
Just as she rounded the corner after the seventh block she saw her home sweet home. The late afternoon sun sparkled on the window glass and she stood on the street imagining the rainbows of blue, red, violet, pink and yellow that would dance along the floor of her front hall as the light prismed through the windows.
Sandra looked up to the sky just in time to see the dark cloud exactly overhead that dribbled a few raindrops on her nose. She wiped her nose with one hand while keeping the other firmly clamped on the ice tongs that held her penny. She looked again at her darkening front door and then saw Miss Abby, her neighbor.
“Miss Abby,” She exclaimed, “Where is your roof?”
Where just this very morning Miss Abby had lived in a lovely house complete with roof, now she sat knitting on her roofless porch with a pouty cloud overhead threatening more teardrops.
“Oh, my dear,” Miss Abby explained, never glancing from her yarn and needles nor losing her smile, “It sailed away.”
Sandra thought back to Miss Abby’s roof which before now she had always taken for granted. She did recollect that, in fact, it had a billowy, sail-like quality as if it were just waiting on a sea-spray filled breeze to carry it off on an ocean adventure.
“It has been a windy day,” Miss Abby added.
As Sandra stood looking at the empty space above Miss Abby’s four walls Tommy Tidwell, Miss Abby’s other neighbor, came to her side.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Sailed away,” Sandra sighed.
They stood imagining the carefree sail snapping its canvas on the crest of the waves without a thought for Miss Abby soon to be soaked by the steady patter from this little black cloud blown here by the same adventurous wind.
“We’ll use my penny,” Sandra said. “Let’s give it a hoist.”
With gloves off and tennis shoes on, with Tommy’s help and the step of a ladder, Sandra hoisted that penny up over the walls, up over the porch, up over Miss Abby and her knitting. The copper penny roof went up just in time to prevent raindrops from reaching the sweater-in-progress which would have shrunk it from a Christmas gift for Tommy to a lovely birthday present for his Chihuahua.
Sandra invited Tommy into her kitchen for a chicken pot pie dinner. They agreed over hot rolls with melted butter that the sturdy copper penny would, in the long run, be a more reliable roof for Miss Abby; it had no aspirations or yearnings to be at sea where it would simply sink to the dark bottom of the ocean and lose all of the advantage of the sun gleaming off of its coppery surface.
While finishing her bowl of chocolate ice cream with chocolate syrup and a small dollop of whipped cream, Sandra stood by her window and thought about her lovely house with its snug roof just seven blocks from her work. “It would only be better,” she pondered, “If I could walk up hill to work in the mornings and roll my penny downhill to home in the afternoon.”
Today, at least, her penny earned saved a sweater