Sometimes We Look Down to Look Up

On an introspective note, I’ve spent some time this week looking down.  Perhaps it's the wan, pale light of winter, but the urge to crawl into my head and stay there (perhaps that's where my missing socks have gone?) has come upon me.
It’s another world, looking down.  A world of discarded snacks; of lost hair ties and ravaged candy wrappers; a house-cleaner’s nightmare of discarded cigarette butts and bus transfers.
I pick these things up, you know, throw them away.
Absolutely free of charge.
I was doing that this morning, absent-mindedly tidying up my part of the city, when there, on the ground, right where the bus will open its doors when it arrives, right where I will be standing when it pulls up, I see a cigarette.
A whole, clean cigarette.
And one penny. Heads up.
They are side by side, as if placed there purposefully.
I look around.  Perhaps I look too deeply sometimes - I once saw implied threats in the tiny mouse head deposited on my front steps by a feline admirer - but I saw in those two things a sort of hope. There are those for whom a found cigarette is comfort, for whom a found, heads-up penny brings luck.
I step back.  I look up.
The bus comes, and I step over the cigarette and the penny, hoping that the person who needs them, finds them.
The doors open.  “Beautiful day,” the bus driver says.
I smile.  He may be on to something.