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Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t.
Either way, Mom had something to say about me buying back the crap I’d already donated.
It’s the kind of thing you bookmark every year, and yet it always sneaks up on me like a thief, robbing me of my breath.
It’s been four years since she passed.
She was my best friend—I only realized that afterward, of course. My mom was a spitfire. Whiskey and cigars in dive bars; champagne and caviar traveling the world with her granddaughter. She made me proud and strong.
Fierce like her.
So when the anniversary of her death came around, I was feeling every bit of her loss.
I missed her amazing, contagious energy. I missed her zest for life. I missed how deeply she loved everyone around her.
I needed her.
I wasn’t supposed to do life without her yet.
Cancer…again. Her fourth or fifth, and final.
I decided to kill some time and do what my mother called “retail therapy.” I went to my local Goodwill, parked the car, and took a deep breath.
And then I said it. Out loud.
“Mom, I could really use a sign that your energy is still out there somewhere.”
That was it.
A simple request.
I got out of the car, grabbed a cart, and headed straight for the back of the store—to home décor.
I turned down the first aisle. Discarded Christmas memories, now for sale.
I rounded the first corner.
And stopped.
At the end of the aisle hung three metal bird signs.
The exact three.
I didn’t wonder whether they looked like mine. I knew how to check.
Years earlier, the little blue bird had cracked in one particular spot. It was something I remembered every time I looked at it.
So I walked over and checked.
There it was.
The crack.
These were mine.
The bird signs my mother had given me seven or eight years earlier. Signs that had decorated every home I’d lived in—including the last one, in a town over.
Four years earlier, when I sold whatever I had left, bought an RV, and set out with the intention of finding myself somewhere… out there…I donated them to Goodwill.
And now, four years later, on the anniversary of my mother’s death, I had sat in a Goodwill parking lot and asked her for a sign. Then I walked inside and found her signs.
I stopped dead in my tracks.
I smiled. I teared up. I felt myself starting to cry—not in some overly dramatic way. I was just happy.
I had gotten exactly what I asked for.
Nothing more.
Nothing less.
A younger, more emotional version of me would have grabbed all three signs, marched them to the cashier while sobbing my entire story to some poor employee, and turned the whole purchase into an emotional roller coaster of pure chaos.
I’m more refined now. Medicated.
So, no.
I laughed because suddenly I could see her: hand on her hip, head tilted, looking at me like I had lost my damn mind.
You’re seriously going to buy back sh*t you donated four years ago?
I could hear her voice.
Not literally.
I can’t explain it, but I heard it as clearly as if she were standing beside me.
It was her.
So, I left the signs hanging there.
I did, however, promptly go home and dig through old photographs.
Because as much as I wanted to believe what had just happened, part of me needed to know that grief hadn’t rewritten the memory in my head. That I hadn’t turned three vaguely familiar birds into something they weren’t because I needed my mother that badly.
I found the photograph.
June 1, 2021.
There they were on my wall: the yellow bird, the blue bird, the red bird.
Exactly as I remembered them.
Maybe it was coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t.
I don’t need to know.
I had asked my mother to show me that her energy was still somewhere out there. A few minutes later, I found three little birds I had given away years before.
I didn’t buy them.
I could practically hear her asking why the hell I would pay for something I’d already donated.
And somehow, that sounded more like my mother than any message from beyond ever could.
~
author: Christie Page
Image: Author's own
Editor: Nicole Cameron
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