Counting Crows

In England, children have a verse they say when they spot a flock of magpies. In America, apparently we use it on crows. It goes like this:

One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret, never to be told

When I first moved to England and was introduced to the fortune-telling power of birds, I saw nothing but pairs of magpies. Joy was certainly the color of my life at that time.
One day I was in a taxi on the way to the airport to visit my boyfriend in Slovenia. On the side of the road I spotted a lone magpie, the first I can recall. When I arrived, my boyfriend ended our short but intense relationship and I blamed the magpie. For a while I saw only single birds.
A couple of years ago, while driving north through the fiery fall mountains of Vermont, I began to see pairs of crows everywhere! I thought this had something to do with the guy I was seeing at the time, but the streak of coupled-bird sightings outlasted the doomed affair.
In Philadelphia there aren't many crows. For a while birds interfered little with my expectations of the future, but with the imminent birth of my sister's first child and my first niece/nephew, I have turned to the birds once again for a hint about whether we're in for a girl or a boy. I have stopped giving crows preferential treatment and am counting any birds I see. They are overwhelmingly grouped in threes, with a party of four thrown in to keep me from being too sure.
In between, pairs of birds continue to appear and give me courage and optimism for my own future. The occasional lone bird used to make my heart sink and I would quickly turn away, as if to deny it's existence. These days I take the loner in stride. I observe him closely to see just what sorrow looks like and what it might teach me. A single pigeon often has a hidden collar of iridescent pinky purple. The robin usually appears by himself, yet he heralds the coming of spring. Sorrow is ever-present. It can make knots of our insides and cripple us with fear or it can become a secret chamber within us that glows with bittersweet ache and allows our joy to be infinitely more alive than it could be in a virgin heart.