My grandfathers are birds.

It’s been more than a decade now since my dad’s dad died. At his funeral we stood out at his gravesite on a spring day in April. The fields around the cemetery were still brown from winter, but the grass and the trees around us were beginning to bud and green.

I distinctly remember looking up and out across the sky while the preacher droned on, and seeing a Great Blue Heron flying in from the north. It flew, graceful and steady, right across the edge of the cemetery and continued on toward the bluffs to the south. The moment felt like it existed outside of time, everything else falling away as the great winged thing made its slow way across the full arc of the sky. Ancient.

Something in me just knew it was him. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It didn’t happen anywhere near my brain so there was no doubt or argument against it. I just recognized him.

Since then herons have made repeated and timely appearances in my life, regularly and auspiciously. I’ve even grown so bold as to ask for them to appear on occasion, when I need some steady reassurance.

On a run one day in 2023 I was preparing to fly my three young daughters across the country for a vacation. Flying makes me anxious. As I trod along my heart begged for some sort of reassurance from the universe that everything would be fine. Moments later, not one, not two, but FIVE great blue herons flew up out of the creek beside me and overhead. It’s the only time in my life I’ve seen that many together.

You get the picture.

In 2019 my mom’s dad died. A few weeks later an adolescent Great Horned Owl appeared in my yard, puffing up its feathers and eying us warily when we approached. It was young enough to still be clumsy and a little fluffy but old enough to manage on its own. I watched it until it left, wondering if possibly…

Thus began several years of regular owl visits. I would run through the park in the morning or evening and listen to the haunting owl call overhead. I grew skilled at finding the dark outline of an owl hidden in the branches of a tree. I began finding owl pellets under the regular trees and my collection grew. I would lay in bed at night and listen to it call outside my window. I would often wake in the morning to the same sound.

Sometimes I would sit on the porch and one would land on the lamp post in front of us. One night it even perched on top of a car parked on the street outside the house.

I watched for months as that owl found a mate. I would listen to them calling to each other, see them together on the power pole. The following spring I found one of their fledglings on the ground in the park, having left the nest a little too soon.

Over the years the owl visits have lessened in frequency, but that makes sense to me. They still seem to come when I need them. For the past two chemo cycles, on the day we head to Omaha to start the cycle I wake to an owl calling outside my window.

The herons are still around as well. Last year in March I drove back and forth from Rochester, MN two times per week trying to juggle my daughter’s radiation schedule with my busy season at work. I saw a heron on every single drive. Sometimes it felt as though they were escorting me, often flying alongside my car for a stretch somewhere out on the Iowa prairie.

I don’t know anything in this world for certain. I don’t understand how or why anything is what it is. I don’t even think I’m much up for trying to figure it out anymore.

I just know that more often than not, when my heart asks a question–or even when it doesn’t–the answer arrives on wings.

This year in March we began radiation again, for a third time. As I made the drive yesterday a giant heron flew up out of the trees along side the road, flying alongside my car like a dinosaur bird in slow motion.