If spirit animals exist, then the Great Blue Heron is mine. We were chosen for each other, or so our “coincidental” encounters over the years make it seem. I’d admired them on occasional visits to northwest Florida, but in October 2013, I started to see them differently because they seemed to see me. It’s tied indirectly to a poet-musician who sang my heart’s song. It’s tied directly to the presence of comfort, hope, and grace in times of transition and loss.

On my first solo trip to the coast to attend a John Prine show in October 2013, I was lucky enough to meet the poet-musician before sound-check. After the encounter, which felt strangely familiar and unfamiliar, funny and awkward—kind of like the disoriented George Bailey meeting his charmingly disheveled Guardian Angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life—I went to Pensacola Beach Pier for an hour or so to sit and watch the waves and clear my head before curtain call. Giddy with my luck at meeting Prine, I pondered the fleeting nature of life: “You’re up one day, the next you’re down.” I knew loss was on my horizon, but I didn’t know how soon it would bear down. My mother was ill with Alzheimer’s disease. The anticipation of losing her made me ache. As I sat and pondered, a Great Blue Heron perched directly across from me on the railing and stayed there for a good long while. It felt like it arrived to witness what that moment meant for me—punctuating Prine and this small frame of time when everything was still in-tact.

There is nothing obviously significant about a heron perched on a beach pier. But a year and a half later, on February 25th, 2015, one lifted into flight over me as I walked on a sidewalk near my neighborhood creek. I’d lived in Auburn a long time, but I had never noticed a heron in town before. It took my breath away. A few hours later, I got a call that my mother had taken a turn for the worse. A few days later, I left her hospice room to give my brother time alone with her. I walked across the parking lot to a pond, sat on an old tree stump, and looked up to find a Great Blue Heron wading in the pond across from me. It had my full attention, and at that moment I knew there was much more to “us” than coincidental crossings. That summer after her passing, I participated in the Alzheimer’s Association’s The Longest Day fundraiser in her honor. I ran the opening “leg” of the day in Navarre Beach, Florida, and a heron perched on the Navarre Beach Pier railing and stayed there—undisturbed by my presence. I attempted my very first selfie with the heron that day. I don’t enjoy being the centerpiece in pictures, so the photo—with just part of my forehead in the frame—turned out to be wildly appropriate. A year to the day after her passing, my son scored his first goal as part of his middle school soccer team. During the game, a heron flew over the field.

Heron encounters in Auburn and elsewhere followed from time to time. But in late February of 2019, when I was feeling particularly uneasy and sad, they showed up in new form—on the back of quarters. I was sweeping up dust bunnies before my dad came to visit, and I saw a little silver glimmer in a pile of debris. As I picked it up, an unfamiliar design on the back of the quarter struck me. It looked like a heron, but was it? It was. It was a 2015 Delaware quarter commemorating Bombay Hook Nature Preserve, apparently known for its large heron population. I took it as a wink from my mom and set it aside in my jewelry drawer. My dad arrived later that day, and during his visit, he complained of back pain and nausea. My brothers and I encouraged him to get it checked out. The news wasn’t good: he had late-stage cancer. In the weeks that followed, I helped as much as I could, and on every drive to Huntsville, a heron flew over me on Highway 280. In late March, there was a large family gathering and we toured the Frank Lloyd Wright House in Florence, Alabama. As we lingered in the parking lot before leaving, two herons flew overhead. In this same timeframe, my son handed me some change after a school trip. In it was another Bombay Hook quarter.

On Memorial Day 2019, just a few months after he first complained of symptoms, we lost my dad—my kids’ beloved Paw-Paw—to cancer. While the heron in this story might be viewed as a bearer of bad news to some, it isn’t. For me, it is a symbol of courage, steadiness, resilience, and hope in times of uncertainty. It is graceful and patient, poised and alert, calm and comfortable in solitude. It wades and nourishes itself in the transitional periods of dawn and dusk—as one phase ends and a new one begins. It embodies the tranquility, balance, and vitality that are part of transformation.