Do you have a denarius for two nickels?

I once found a copy of the cassette version of "America's Greatest Hits" on the sidewalk in Towson during a pouring rainstorm. I let it dry out for a week or so, and then it played just fine, but it was only a matter of time before it was replaced by a CD of the same album, which I am still looking for on the sidewalks of the county seat. No luck yet.

Another time I found the a tiny version of a Swiss Army knife. It has a small blade, scissors, and a screwdriver. Not bad for something I found free for nothing while walking a nature trail.

And that's about it for the entries in the What I Found file, but we can't all be lucky like 8-year-old Bjarne, over in Bremen, Germany, who was playing in the sandbox at his school when he dug up a silver Denarius. 

No, that's not a fancy racing car, it's a Roman coin at least 1,800 years ago. 

Uta Halle, the Bremen state archaeologist, says, “We are glad that Bjarne was so careful. [The discovery is] very special, because there have only been two comparable coin finds from the Roman Empire in the city of Bremen.”

It's a puzzle how the coin even got there, because much of what we now call Germany was within the borders of the old Roman Empire, but Bremen was not!

So maybe someone in the last 1,800 years went to Rome and bought sandals or something and went back home with this coin as change from the purchase.

Or maybe it fell in the River Weser and washed up on shore in Bremen and was part of a pile of sand scooped up for the sandbox.

Or it could be that a careless coin collector was playing in the sandbox.

It's a pretty cool souvenir and I wish young Bjarne a lot of fun showing it to people for the rest of his life. 

Two sides of the same coin.