Signs and Omens

It's not that I'm superstitious - I'm not, except in the hard-wired, limbic system-kind of way that almost all of us are - but the economy's still bad, the Government may shut down on September 30, and a satellite is going to hit the earth sometime today, so it's hard not to assign meaning to what may be chance observations.

Of course, sometimes when something usual happens, it does mean something. Last weekend I was running an errand and noticed that the "check engine" light was on. We took it in to the shop Monday morning and I asked while they were at it that they check the brakes. The "check engine" light was on because the gas cap was loose, as it turned out, but the brakes needed major work. So, at least if the satellite crashes into the road ahead of me, I might be able to stop.

Sometime in the last week or two I saw a bluebird in the backyard. I've been a backyard birdwatcher for a couple of years now and I've never seen a bluebird in the yard before. In fact, I've never seen a bluebird at all. I've been watching, but I haven't seen it back.

Tuesday night I was heading out to pick up Iain from Boy Scouts and heard fireworks. Driving down Cumberland, I saw them - explosions of red and gold, unexpectedly in the sky, visible between the trees. Later that night, a really loud party, somewhere nearby, followed by the flashing blue lights of a police car; after that it was quiet.

It's raining this morning, the sort of slow steady rain that soaks into the ground. It rained on Tuesday, and yesterday afternoon was raining when I came home from work and has been raining since then, I think. But on Wednesday, September 21 - the International Day of Peace - the paper pinwheels the Girl Scouts made at their last meeting were out on the lawn at Haygood, as a tangible expression of hope for something better.



They are made from plastic drinking straws, paper, beads, and a bit of pipe cleaner, and are not very substantial. I had assumed that they wouldn't really work as pinwheels, and the best we could hope for was a day that didn't rain, so I would not be retrieving bits of soggy paper from the Haygood lawn Wednesday night. But yesterday I got an email from one of the parents of a girl in the troop who said they had looked great, spinning in the breeze that day.

When we picked them up Wednesday night, Iain left one of them - the one I had made as a sample to show the girls - on the dashboard of the car. It had "International Peace Day" written in blue and green crayon in concentric squares on both sides of the paper wings. Yesterday when I got to work I decided to bring it into my office. If I held it just right, there was enough air movement just from walking for it to turn, and when there was a breeze, it spun.

I don't know that it means anything, but it did make me smile.