Oh, You Fetching Thing!

When I was a teenager and my parents got divorced, my mother took me to pick out a new bed as a consolation prize for moving out of the house I had lived in all my life and starting over somewhere new. I picked out a black, wrought iron, four-poster bed with a raven motif. Later, in college, I would notice dozens of crows congregating on my lawn now and then. I liked something about them as a symbolic presence, so commonplace and yet so sinister. I met someone rather special, and it turned out that he had worked on a scientific project documenting the habits of the local crow population the previous semester. I thought that was a good omen. His knowledge of crows was limitless. Living on an upper floor in a city apartment, I haven't seen a crow in quite a while. A moment ago, a pleasant thought of ravens and their elegant, wicked ways suddenly occurred to me, which I interpreted as portending something quite promising on the horizon. As luck would have it. [Image: "Crow #2" by Jim Dine]