Wednesday: a beautiful mild day, everything thawing. Walking home, hatless and mittenless, from the grocery store with bananas in my backpack, hunting for a cherry coughdrop in my parka pocket under the wadded-up kleenex and old shopping lists. (My parka pockets have reached almost maximal squalor.) Digging deeper, I felt the cold of metal against my fingers: oh, good. Spare change.

One of the small glories of living in Canada is the existence of $1 and $2 coins, called respectively the loonie (because the $1 coin has a loon on its obverse) and the toonie (because two loonies... oh, you get it). Others may have complained about the demise of the old $1 and $2 bills. I was tickled. I have adored these coins since they were first introduced. A small bag of them makes a wonderful present for a kid, which is nice. But the best thing about them is that they lurk.

You find them at the bottom of purses, in change wallets, on the bedroom dresser, in jacket pockets, and when you think you're broke, there they are. It's difficult to ignore a $20 bill; try putting one in your raincoat pocket in the fall and forgetting it's there, so you can have the joy of discovering it next spring. Uh huh. I gave up on that one years ago. But loonies and toonies are small enough to ignore. You drop them into your pocket without a second thought, and then later - kazaam! - you find you've got $5 or $10 that you didn't know you owned.

It's not just the money; it's the sense of having been given a delightful surprise. Of course, a surprise $1000 bill would be even nicer, but I'll settle for what life gives me.

Digging into my pockets, I found I had three loonies and a toonie, a whole $5 unaccounted for, free money so far as I was concerned. And it occurred to me that grace is like this, especially in being so often small and unobtrusive. We are so intent on the big miracles that we miss the small stuff. We are so concerned with doing Great Portentous Things that it doesn't occur to us that what matters most is how we act in the small dailiness of life.

I don't know why, but I suddenly remembered a woman in our community, a young mother with breast cancer. For months, she and her friends and church and family pounded their fists on Heaven's gate, shouting to God, demanding a big miracle: a cure, her restoration to health. They fought so fiercely that no one was allowed near her who had the least doubt that God would CURE her. They'd settle for no less. And then she died.

Now, looking back, I think that one of the saddest parts of the whole sad business was that, in her intense longing for that $1000 bill, that big miracle, she'd likely missed all the small change. What of all the minute instances of grace that you can find in life if you're half willing to look for them? Had she picked up the ordinary dailiness of her life, turning it over in her hands and considering it lovingly, before she had to set it down? I don't know, but I don't think so.

Maybe she didn't think the small stuff was important, compared to the hugeness of the miracle she wanted - and how can I criticize her? I'm dying too, we all are, but it's not imminent in my case, as it was in hers. It may take me another thirty years to get there. But I hope that when I get within sight of that river, I will remember to finger the small change of my life, before laying it down and turning away from it.

I've known all along that the most convincing love is in the small stuff, not in great sacrifices and acts of nobility. There's no one who can't rise to those, when life demands them of us. The small stuff is strangely harder. But real love comes in pea-sized chunks, in ordinary courtesies, in five-minute sessions of listening, in the small change of ordinary human commerce. Real love has that solid clunky feel of a loonie in the pocket, something you can finger and count on.

A thousand loonies would feel infinitely more like riches than a single piece of paper with the Queen's mug on it, even if the two mean the same to the bank. Small change has a weight to it; it's substantial; it keeps you grounded. And you can spread it around more easily.

Three loonies and a toonie... I considered transferring them to my wallet and thought, no, I like them where they are. I could choose to drop them into a charity collection box at the grocery store, or give one to my kid for a treat, or buy another pack of cherry coughdrops. But for now, I think I'll just finger them as I walk home, and think about love and the dailiness of things.