I looked out this morning to – a yard of white. Sure enough, snow overnight. Just a dusting that didn’t last through the sunny daylight hours. Temps stayed a little below freezing all day and the wind was brisk. All in all, a raw day, even for March. Winter doesn’t want to give up.

It’s a modern illusion that the world is small. But it’s big enough to swallow entire jet airliners occasionally. My house is small in the grand scheme of things, but even so I don’t know everything within. Lately Lilly has taken to clearing debris out of her room – it’s going to take her a while – and I was doing some consulting about the best ways to arrange her closet.

On her cluttered desk I saw a small coin, a bronze color as some coins have, but no U.S. currency. Sometimes coins get loose from my accumulation of cheap foreign specie and wind up at random locations in the house, so I thought that had happened.

But no. It’s a shower token from the Platte River Campground at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. We visited in 2007, and even camped there, but I don’t remember buying, using or leaving with any tokens. But it seems that I did. Which somehow got up into Lilly’s room – which wasn’t Lilly’s room back in 2007. Go figure.

I’ll put it with my other tokens. I don’t have many. Fun word for the day: exonumia, which Merriam-Webster defines as “numismatic items (as tokens, medals, or scrip) other than coins and paper money.” First known use, 1962, so I’m older than the word. Barely.

Just using my memory, I believe I have a subway token from Moscow and one from St. Petersburg; one of the discontinued CTA tokens (maybe); a token of some kind from New York; a car wash token from somewhere; and a Chuck E. Cheese token, though I might be wrong about that. Unlike Russia or New York, I do my best to forget my two or three visits to that place.