Wings of Fortune

I toss a quick glance, like salt, over my left shoulder as I get in my car, barely awake, to take kids to the bus stop. Is she there? Some mornings when the sun is bright, I pull back the drapes in my bedroom and look first thing. She’s an early bird, and often she’s already landed—punctual, a morning staple, like the newspaper waiting in the damp grass. My bedroom window overlooks the driveway, and from both vantage points I have the slimmest keyhole view through my neighbor’s gate out toward the harbor, where at the end of a dock she sits. A Great Blue Heron, regal, still, her pewter feathers nearly indistinguishable from the slate sky. She is my talisman, and when I catch her there, for some inexplicable reason, my day feels charmed.

What is this connection, I wonder? Why do I attach some meaning, some significance, to this creature’s perch of choice, here, in my narrow line of vision? I pause and watch, admiring her quiet certitude. She knows just where she wants to be, honing her awkward wings to light upon the exact same spot, day after day, on the sad, tumble-down dock left to fend for itself after a hurricane years ago twisted the two-by-fours into what now looks like a decomposing strand of DNA. She could land several feet over in either direction and claim swankier docks with smooth boards and flags waving in the morning breeze, but no, she opts for old splintered wood, weathered to her same shade of gray.

Some mornings her elegant S neck and head are turned toward the open harbor, her stiletto beak pointing eastward, sharp and intentional. Other days she’s hunched, balancing impossibly on one spindly leg, her long neck and other leg both retracted, folded into her body. I imagine her eyes shut. She’ll stay bowed down against the chill for hours. A monk with bad posture.

The Great Blue is the largest member of the heron family, and the males and females, according to ornithologists, are indistinguishable. But my visitor has other markings I recognize as decidedly female—a quiescence that suggests the practiced art of waiting: waiting for children to come home, for someone else to fold the laundry, for a lover to say the right words, for her dervish mind to settle.

For a while the heron was keeping regular dock hours, and I began to imagine her my muse. She was a gift from the wild beyond, I fantasized, the steely angel I’d been waiting for to swoop down with her great wingspan, bringing inspiration and missives that I was somehow to decode from her silent stance. Her faithful presence spurred my magical thinking. “Okay, this is going to be the day,” I’d think, with the same irrational optimism I have on a morning when my horoscope is promising, or when I solve the Sudoku before my coffee gets cold. Today I’ll get a big break.

Today the words will flow; deadlines will be met. Who knows, maybe the real Vanity Fair editor will call out of the blue, instead of my friend Emily disguising her voice on my answering machine, taunting me, knowing full well that every writer dreams the blinking message light will one day mean, “Hey, you’ve hit the big time.”

Then my Great Blue won’t show for days, or at least she won’t be there when I think to look for her, and I am disappointed. My Publisher’s Clearing House mentality (“ding dong—you’re a millionaire!”) shifts back to reality. But in fact I realize nothing much changes either way. Whether she’s there or not, most days hold the same struggle for focus, for energy, clarity and confidence, for not getting sidetracked by clutter or compulsive e-mail checking.

Even so, looking for the heron has become a habit, an automatic turn of the head each time I get in and out of my car or walk by my bedroom window, much like the ritual gestures athletes perform when they’re up at bat. I’m fascinated by these good luck genuflections—the precise way Maria Sharapova approaches the service line, puts wisps of hair behind each ear, bends over and gives a slow, steady bounce, bounce, bounce, before delivering a 115-mile-per-hour ace. The way J.J. Redick religiously dribbles twice, spins the basketball backwards as he bends his knees, cocks his elbows, then swish. Every time. How is it we jinx ourselves into believing our small, insignificant actions impact an outcome?

Maybe because our small actions are not so insignificant. Because that’s the only way we ever impact anything. A glance over my shoulder seeking a mysterious heron may be one of the saner things in my daily routine. Not because her presence or absence holds any real sway over the events and juju of my day, but because I paused, I looked. Luck, I believe, is neither blind nor dumb. It’s awake, aware, intelligent. It patiently takes note.

My good fortune is the awe and gratitude I experience when the Great Blue beauty has appeared again. My sheer amazement that for some reason she has chosen this one spot in the whole expanse of shore and marsh to return to and sit and mull over warming sea temperatures, disappearing wetlands or the upcoming election, or whatever it is she mulls over. In that quick glance I take flight from my small world of piddly concerns and share in nature’s quiet and incomprehensible offering. Hope, as Emily Dickinson wrote, may be the thing with feathers, but so is luck, so is blessing.

Stephanie Hunt is a freelance writer, editor and occasional birdwatcher in Mt. Pleasant, SC. Vanity Fair editors can contact her at ­huntsw@comcast.net.

~Stephanie Hunt