Beyond a certain level, the brain struggles to make sense of numbers and figures.

We might hear something described as being “100 football fields long,” and maybe we can get our heads around that, at least the idea of that size. Can we get a feeling for a distance?

Lump sums get weird, like how we talk about socking away money for retirement. Having a number in mind seems useful, but it’s a big enough pile that there is no physical sense of an amount like that. Most of us aren’t handling $100 bills regularly, let alone cash versions of the many thousands we’re trying to save and invest for our future selves. These amounts are numbers on screens, paychecks that are never actually printed, digital deposits being shuffled around various platforms on the air.

And no matter how big or small the figure is, it takes conscious effort to make sense of a number.

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I don’t know what to make of my mother’s money. It feels strange to even call it “money.” It’s sitting in a beneficiary IRA. When I inherited it, I could have cashed out some portion of it, still could. But I couldn’t imagine doing that.

My brain still hasn’t recognized it as money, as that thing that might be exchanged for goods and services.

It’s a gift my mother made consciously to us, each of her four children, a determination she made before her death. Her retirement accounts were split equally among us. That’s how she wanted that part of things handled.

It was her retirement money. She wasn’t touching it. She didn’t work for the last part of her life, first by choice and then—not. It wasn’t going to be used as such by her; odds were, she wouldn’t be there to use it.

So this pile, it was meant for me. It’s what she wanted, really and truly, though I hate that phrase, any use, every time I hear it.

It also doesn’t matter that it’s what she wanted. It’s mine now.

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$303.10—that’s how much cash my family and I found at the airport.

The dime was perched on a ledge around the corner from the fast food place, but we found the bulk of it first, before we got to the terminal.

“This is what you might call an ethical dilemma!” we told our daughter.

I had asked her to pick up the fold of bills when I saw it, lying out of the way on the tiled floor, just beyond the path of the snake line at security.

“Winner-winner, chicken dinner,” said someone behind us when they noticed what she was doing.

“Maybe we’ll find people to give it away to,” I suggested to my people almost immediately, loudly enough that the onlookers would hear.

My instinct was to pick up the money. You don’t leave it on the ground, I thought to myself. This wasn’t some childhood finders-keepers logic. It’s something like putting out a rain barrel and watering the plants. You gotta get this stuff moving. It doesn’t serve anyone lying on the ground. I didn’t need it to be mine, but it was a waste for it to be no one’s.

I clocked that there was at least one $100 bill in the stack. Too much to keep. Too weird, too weighty. But we picked it up, so now we had to make a decision.

“Don’t you think we should turn it in?” Billy asked gently, like it was obvious. Maybe he’d already realized how much it was, how suspicious we would look handing out mysterious cash in an airport. I’ve got ideas, but he can imagine implications.

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I have a subscription at a cafe that entitles me to unlimited beverages, all month, every month I subscribe. I sit in their booths for hours at a time, sipping hazelnut coffee or sprinkling cinnamon into cups of decaf, to write and to work. When I realized after some weeks that I hadn’t been haunting them enough to pay for the subscription, I clicked a button on their website to cancel.

“Are you sure?” they wanted to know, and a string of large green type offered me a reduced price. Would I be interested in staying if they charged me a third less than what I was previously paying?

I was at turns insulted and delighted. A loyal customer wasn’t offered this reward: a quitter was. And now they’ve made a waffler out of me.

And I fell for it anyway, because I’d already decided that “the math needs to make sense.” At this rate, it did. So I clicked. I accepted the terms of this world where we agree to manipulate each other, where we each walk away with something, so long as we can stand the taste.

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The numbers means what we make them to mean. I wondered if someone would miss their $303. Was that money a per diem? Were any of those bills headed for the inside of a birthday card?

Where was the traveler going? Did they know, does anyone?

If not dropped, would it have bought another a plane ticket, or part of one? Maybe combined with those airline miles, those distances reduced to numbers on a screen, maybe it could take you pretty far.

We can’t imagine how far.

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