Ah, nepenthe, a word I first heard long ago when I was a cub reporter in Burlington and came to know "Grammie" Robinson.

One day my telephone at work rang and a silvery voice with a pleasant "Yankee" accent said she liked my style of writing and would I come to Thanksgiving dinner the next day. She would be serving Long Island duck. I went and, in my heart, never left.

She was the wife of the town's foremost pediatrician, who soon after their marriage, had chosen to settle in Burlington.

"We almost starved to death the first year," she once chuckled. "Everybody thought we were foot doctors."

She taught me so many of the little nuances of life: How to appreciate the song of birds. To leave my shower door "ajar" to discourage mold. To say "picture" instead of "pitcher" for something that is framed.

And that it's more Christian to be out tramping the streets in the poorest section of town, campaigning for water and sewer lines for poor black families, than it was to be shuffling cards and sipping white zinfandel at the Alamance Country Club.

After my wife and I married and were trying to survive on the pay of a schoolteacher and a $70-a-week reporter, my benefactor would occasionally send us a check for $5. In the "For" space at the bottom of the check, she always wrote "nepenthe."

I was forced to visit Webster to learn the word's meaning: "A potion used by the ancients to induce forgetfulness of pain." Those occasional $5 nepenthes eased the pain of a tight budget and allowed us a night out at Balentines cafeteria.

While my daughters were in college, and even later, they were frequent recipients of checks from home marked "nepenthe."

My wife says the word "lagniappe" is just as apt as nepenthe. A friend introduced the word to her.

While a grad student at Louisiana State University, the friend had stopped to pump $5 worth of gas in her car but came up with $5.17. Inside, when she kept fishing in her purse for the 17 cents, the attendant said, "Oh, never mind the 17 cents. Just consider it a lagniappe."

"I couldn't wait to get home and look up the word in the dictionary," she said. A lagniappe, she learned, is a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of purchase.

Another synonym for "nepenthe" is "found money," coined by a longtime friend. Sally justifies indulging in some extravagance such as trading cars or taking a trip by saying, "Oh, I'm using 'found money' for this," referring to a tax refund or a higher than normal stock dividend check.

So the government's "gift" of up to $600 per person, aimed at stimulating a sleepy economy that may be headed into a coma, qualifies as a "nepenthe," "lagniappe" or "found money." Or perhaps even a "windfall," a timeworn word birthed by apple growers referring to fruit dislodged from the tree by the wind.

Our world is full of nepenthes that we ignore or take for granted. For example, not long ago I head the first call of the thrush from the woods behind our house.

Robert Browning immortalized this shy songster with, "That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture."

So friends, get off your cellphones or iPods just long enough to listen and enjoy springtime's nepenthes.