I'm fond of scanning territory, ground level, as I walk and run around the neighborhood. One sunny day I found an item I would never have expected to see. I ran a three mile route that day, a loop that starts and ends at my driveway. As I finished I walked back and forth in front of the house for a few minutes to warm down. As I'm walking I'm watching the ground out of habit. A small yellow object glints at me in the gutter in front of the house across the street. My first thought is that I somehow dropped a yellow guitar pick of mine, perhaps crossing the street on the way to the church where I often played. So I bent down and picked it up out of the leaves and dirt. The object was too heavy for a guitar pick, and gold, not yellow. I brushed it off and it started looking more and more like actual gold. I wiped it clean enough and put a tooth to it, arr matey like pirates do. My right canine left a nice dent. I was mostly sure by now that the thing was, actually, a lump of gold. I had a friend at the time who worked in a science lab and had access to an electron scanning microscope and, curious as I was, offered to take the lump of metal in to check it out. She brought back a little printout from the scan that declared the object legitimate. I had found a one ounce lump of gold right in front of my house. Keep those eyes open!