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GREENSBORO — This week, you can expect Mary Beisner to find a few.

She’ll be in her backyard, 50 steps from her swimming pool. She’ll probably be sitting near her sweetgum tree beside No. 10, watching the crowd of the Wyndham Championship pass by like a slow-moving wave.

And as she watches from her spot beside Sedgefield Country Club, she’ll find them — in her ivy, half-buried like turtle eggs, sporting names, pop-culture images and even pen-scrawled drawings of a five-petal flower.

She’ll pluck them like ripened fruits and carry them to her house. She’ll wash them, dry them off and drop them in a wicker basket so her youngest grandchildren can roll them willy-nilly across her family room floor.

It’s another one for her collection, a collection she’s had for 33 years.

That’s a lot of golf balls.

But that’s Mary. She’s 71, a mother of five, a grandmother of 10. She’s always been a collector of things.

Growing up outside Chicago, she collected playing cards with images of cats and dogs, trains and airplanes. Today, Mary keeps a counter from a Chicago soda fountain in her pool house and two bowling balls in her poolside garden.

And she has her golf balls.

She’s found a few in her pool. But mostly, she’s found them in her backyard, the tell-tale sign of a bad slice.

To her, the golf balls tell stories of a storied golf course in the smallest of details.

It’s the logos, the etchings in ballpoint, the balls faded from white to beige that, taken together, show the history and tradition of a place where legends — and wanna-be legends — have always come to play.

This week, Mary will look for the Metropolitan Life blimp above her house. She wrote about it last year in her Christmas letter. And she’ll listen for the roar rolling across the fairways and wonder, “Who’s that they’re following now?’’

But if her grandchildren come to swim, she knows she’ll have to play sentry. She’ll stand on the deck, watch for the gallery, and if they come, she’ll raise her hands and give the universal sign of “Quiet!’’ if her grandchildren get too loud.

And maybe, during her golf-watching week, she’ll find a few balls.

Mary doesn’t keep them, mind you. She gives them away. She sticks them in an egg carton and gives them as a gift to someone deserving, like the young boy at church who dreams of being the next Tiger Woods.

“Just remember me when you get rich and famous,’’ she’s told the boy at Sedgefield Presbyterian, the church she attends.

And Mary knows something about the rich and famous. You get that from her big-letter sign out front. She put it out a few days ago, between the two peace lilies bearing ribbons of blue, the color of Wyndham.

ARNOLD PALMER SLEPT HERE.

She lives in a five-bedroom house, where Arnold Palmer stayed when he came to play three decades ago at the major-league PGA tournament known back then as the Greater Greensboro Open.

When major-league golf returned to Sedgefield last year after a 31-year absence, she put up the sign. One of her neighbors called it “tacky.’’ Mary had a ready response.

“Don’t worry,’’ she told the neighbor. “I’ve already talked to Arnold about it.’’

And she did, down at Pinehurst, way back in 1977, a year after she and her husband Marty bought the house. She saw Palmer at No. 2.

“I yelled, 'Mr. Palmer, we bought the house where you used to stay when you played the GGO, and you know those signs you see that say, 'George Washington slept here?’ Well, I’m going to put up a sign that says 'Arnold Palmer Slept Here,’ ’’ she said the other day. “And he just laughed.’’

She still has the rainbow-colored umbrella Palmer used at the GGO so many years ago. Or, so she’s been told. The umbrella came with the house.

She keeps it in a corner, near her wicker basket of golf balls, her tiny trophies from Greensboro’s trophy course.

She knows she could use a wall to display them all. But she doesn’t want that. It’s too formal, too contrived. She just likes the idea of finding them, picking them up and wondering, “Where did this one come from?’’

“You walk the course, see these balls,’’ she says, “and it’s like picking cherries, fruit off a tree.’’

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com