My sister-in-law Peggy had what Harry Potter fans (and she was one) would call a Patronus: a kindred spirit from the animal world that visited her in times of uncertainty or distress, providing comfort, reassurance, or guidance.
“Peggy was always sure that the presence or call of a barred owl told her that all would be well,” my brother Steve commented on a Facebook post I made last August, a photo of a barred owl that had flown across our camp road in front of my car and perched nearby.
The night before my niece Sara and her husband, Michael, got married, in August of 1999, they left their dog, Kismet, in Steve and Peggy’s care at the Red House. When Peggy let Kismet out before bed, she uncharacteristically wandered off in the dark (Kismet, not Peggy!) and couldn’t be found. No amount of searching and calling brought her back, and finally, worried and hoarse, Steve and Peggy went to bed and slept fitfully, fearing the worst—that Kismet would not return, and Sara’s wedding day would be ruined.
The next morning, Peggy awoke to the call of a barred owl. She knew then, she said, that “everything was going to be all right.” Sure enough, when she hurried downstairs and opened the back door, Kismet was there, asleep on the porch and none the worse for her night of adventure.
It wasn’t the first time a barred owl had appeared and provided Peggy with solace and reassurance. Several years earlier, on an icy winter day, her car had slid off the road on her way home. It happened on the notoriously slippery and slanted stretch of the Sunday River Road in an area known to locals as “the Alps,” which each winter sent at least a few vehicles slithering into the ditch. (That section of road has since been rebuilt to accommodate the heavy and hasty ski traffic; I don’t think it claims many victims these days, and I doubt anyone even calls it the Alps anymore, but IYKYK.)
“When Dad and I went down to get her, there was a barred owl on a branch right above her car,” Sara says.
For the rest of her life, Peggy was often visited by a barred owl at times when she most needed reassurance that things were going to work out all right.
Charlotte Kirsten, a trauma psychotherapist and astrologer, believes that “owls are true messengers of the spiritual realm.” Just as Peggy discovered, they can appear as a guide during challenging times. “Unlike any other animal symbol, they relay truth, understanding, patience, and wisdom to us when we need it most. This is especially true during or after times of upheaval and distress.”
I have always loved barred owls, and counted myself lucky whenever I saw or heard one, which wasn’t all that often, until last summer, our first summer without Peggy. We moved to camp in May, and suddenly, barred owls were everywhere.
A couple of times I saw them in the daytime, gliding soundlessly from tree to tree along a trail I was hiking, but mostly they visited me after dark. Nearly every night, all summer long, they were outside my window, conversing with their usual “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you-all?” call, but also sometimes performing what the Cornell Lab of Ornithology aptly describes as “a riotous duet of cackles, hoots, caws, and gurgles.”
One night, after falling asleep to the calls of the owls, I dreamed I had a tattoo of a barred owl with Peggy’s name, in her own handwriting, below it. When I woke up, I looked at my arm, half expecting to see it there.
I am not a tattoo person. In fact, I have never, ever thought I’d get one myself. So many people have them nowadays, including two of my own kids, that I no longer roll my eyes when I see them and wonder what possesses someone to think permanently marking their body is a good idea, but it’s not something I ever intended to do myself.
But the oddly specific nature of my dream, and then a similar, less detailed dream I had a few weeks later, made me unable to stop thinking about it.
The barred owls hung around all summer; I think they must have nested nearby, because on some nights I heard what sounded like a whole family calling, chuckling, and caterwauling in the trees around the camp.
Peggy’s birthday was November 7th. In September, the day after we moved home from camp, I made an
appointment with a local tattoo artist, and last Tuesday, the day that Peggy would have turned 81, I got the tattoo from my dream: a detailed black and gray barred owl, with her signature, including the “xxoo” with which she always signed notes to family and friends.
I got tattooed on my right inner forearm. That was where the tattoo from my dream was located, and I never considered putting it anywhere else. But it wasn’t until after it was done that I realized why: when I cross my arm across my chest, I can hold my owl close to my heart.
The same place where I will always hold Peggy.