I asked the river what to do about the job. I felt foolish saying it out loud. Then a stick — long, smooth, river-worn — bumped against my shin three times. I took it home. I quit the job two days later. The stick is on my desk.
The first time I asked for a sign, I asked for an eagle. I figured it was specific enough to be unmistakable and rare enough to be impossible. Three days later, one circled the parking lot at the grocery store. I sat in the car and laughed and cried at the same time.
When my marriage ended, I started keeping the small flat stones I found on walks. By the end of that year I had a bowl of them on the kitchen table. I didn't know why I was doing it. Now I do. Every one of them held me, a little, on a day I needed holding.
The junco came to the kitchen window every morning of my father's last winter. After he died, it stopped. I told myself I was being silly. Then, on the one-year mark, it came back. Just for that morning.
I had been thinking, for weeks, about whether to leave. The night I decided, the wind came up so hard it took the porch screen door off its hinges and laid it flat on the lawn. The door — the literal door — was off. I was not going to be argued with.
I had been sober for ninety days when the deer came into the yard with her two fawns. She let me watch them nurse for ten minutes from the kitchen window, and then she looked right at me. I have not had a drink since. That was four years ago.