An Auspicious Owl

A burrowing owl, only slightly longer than a blade of grass, stares at the inauspicious photographer.

My grandmother was a singularly superstitious person, also known as Ukrainian. She wouldn’t allow windows to be open even in the heat of summer and didn’t permit whistling inside the house, because it was akin to inviting the devil inside.

I was a whistler from the moment I figured out how to purse my lips enough to make those high-pitched sounds. If bad luck could be summed up in, let’s say, rodents, then I’m the Pied Piper of bad luck for the sheer number of places I’ve condemned over my whistling career.

The fear of inviting the devil inside led me down a long and winding trail of inauspicious things in this world. From bats to black cats and owls, I encountered a menagerie of critters condemned to purgatory for their association with black magic and the thousands of years of human history before science.

But owls are auspicious, I think. How can you take an icon of the night, adapted to seeing in the dark and silent flight and call it anything but auspicious? We humans lack these traits and so can better appreciate them in a beaked, feathered, taloned package like the owl.

These are the thoughts that careen around my brain whenever I spot an owl these days.