My rides around the DC area involve passing three golf courses. As any duffer will tell you, balls that are abandoned in the weeds beyond the course are fair game. Finders keepers and all that. I have made a habit of picking up golf balls when I spot them on the side of the road. When I get back home, I toss the balls into a cloth bag and forget about them,
Yesterday I rode on Fort Hunt Road for the first time in a few weeks. The road surface has been milled for repaving. This makes for bad riding (especially if you manage to hit an exposed manhole cover). Not having ridden by Belle Haven Country Club, there was an unusual bounty of balls along the road. I passed on the first one I saw because it was in an intersection. Then I saw another, and another, and another….eleven in all. I felt like turning towards the golf course on the opposite side of the road and yelling, “Hold your fire!!!”
The eleven was a sort of personal record for a single ride. I normally find multiple balls in the spring when the ground is hard and the golfers are rusty. Yesterday’s haul may be evidence that the pandemic has caused a secondary pandemic of lousy golfers.
In any case, I decided to empty the bag and see how many balls I have found this year.
A Few Spokes Shy of a Wheel 
I stayed with family friends back when I was a kid. Their fields backed on to a golf course and they used to get a bounty for every returned ball. They used to gather a bucket every few weeks 👌
I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. Maybe I can make something out of them, a collection of wine corks, and those bags of drying crystals that come inside medicine.