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Although pennies are no longer in general circulation in Canada, the forest economy is different. While taking a hike last May, I found a 1978 Canadian penny on the forest floor of Serena Gundy Park. Then I shifted it to a curved patch of moss for a photo and left it there.

Two months later, I followed the same trail, and to my surprise I saw a penny in almost the same spot! However, it wasn’t the same one, for it had been minted 29 years after the penny I’d previously discovered. The 2007 coin rested just beside the moss patch, possibly nudged from it by a curious animal.

Thank you, mysterious hiker, for creating an anonymous penny exchange! If I had had a penny with me, I would have extended the game. As it was, I took a picture and let the coin remain there for the next pair of wondering eyes.

Near the beginning of an extended walk last November, I became transfixed by a tall flapping windsock outside a bakery. I ended up taking over seventy pictures of the wind-animated figure, and each one had a different pose. It was like receiving a free art class on the topic of gesture studies!

It’s astonishing how expressive fabric can be when it composes a long tube for the body, two hollow arms, and a head with strips of black cloth for hair. The different angles of the head and arms as well as various bends in the body’s “spine” gave strong impressions of joy, fatigue, despair, sass, embarrassment, playfulness, surrender, overwhelm, triumph, and humor.

I managed to reduce the number of pictures by more than half, but I still need to ask viewers’ indulgence for the quantity of images posted here. (Sending a big thank you to Veronica Paloma for her thoughtful comments on these photos when I first posted them on Facebook last fall and for providing ideas for the titles “Bliss Float,” “Cheerleader,” and “Responding to the Latin Beat.”)