It started with the ducks in the pool. Not real ones. Well, sometimes real ones. But mostly it was that I began seeing ducks everywhere, all at once, in a way that went past coincidence and started to feel like something. A duck floating in our swimming pool one morning. A duck at the store, staring at me from a shelf. A stuffed duck, of all things, just sitting outside, left there by no one I could account for. Duck pictures. Duck memes landing in my feed. Ducks and ducks and ducks, a sudden strange abundance of them, until I couldn’t not notice anymore.

This was right after my boyfriend came out to visit me for the first time. Which is to say it was the very beginning of something, a hopeful and terrifying threshold, the point where I’d let someone new all the way in and had no idea yet how it would go. And into that tender, uncertain little window, the ducks came. I kept trying to figure out why. That’s how I’m built. I saw the pattern and I wanted the reason, turning it over, asking what on earth ducks had to do with anything, why that of all things, why now.

And then I remembered, my mom had a pet duck when she was a little girl. She’d told me about it several times. She loved that duck. And then one day her grandpa told her the duck was gone, just gone, with the kind of vagueness that adults use with children about things like that, and it stayed with her. It marked her. Decades later she still carried it, this small early grief, the pet she loved and lost before she was old enough to understand where it went. It was one of the tender places in her, and she’d let me see it. So when I remembered the duck, something settled in me, and I made a decision. I decided to believe. I decided that the ducks were my mom reaching out to me.

I can’t prove that, and I’m not going to pretend I can. But I’ve never needed proof for the things I believe in. I believe in the ethereal, in the unseen, in the way something can move through a life that the visible world doesn’t quite explain. And I decided that this was my mother, reaching me the only way she had left, through the image of the very thing she’d loved and lost as a girl. The duck that was taken from her and all these years later, as the duck she sends to me.

I think about the timing of it and it undoes me a little. She came right at the start of something new. When I’d opened a door I was scared to open, right when a daughter might most wish her mother were alive to see it, to weigh in, to tell her it was going to be okay. My mom couldn’t stand in my kitchen and meet him. She couldn’t ask me the questions a mother asks. But I let myself believe she found another way to be there for it. She sent ducks. She let me know she was around, watching, present at the threshold, the way she always was when it counted.

Maybe it’s coincidence. Maybe I’m a woman who misses her mother finding her mother in a run of random waterfowl. I’ve considered that, and I’ve decided I don’t care. Because choosing to believe she’s here costs me nothing and gives me everything, and I would rather live in a world where my mom still finds ways to reach me than in the colder, tidier one where she’s simply gone. So now, when I see a duck, I don’t puzzle over it anymore. I just say hi to my mom. I’m here. I’ve got you. I always did.