This morning there was a vulture in our yard, sitting high up on the railing of the little bridge that leads from my husband’s office door to an insignificant spot in the yard. We call this bridge “the bridge to nowhere” because it serves no discernable purpose. Which didn’t stop us from spending a small fortune to replace its warped boards and re-stain it, making it a bridge from our wallet to our contractor’s wallet, across which a lot of money travelled.

Our dog Jada was very interested in the vulture, which was roughly two-thirds her size, but we did not let her investigate closely. I was worried the vulture would ferry her away to its restaurant in the sky, or carve a hole in her side with its massive, curved beak. So I brought her in and Googled vultures. It turns out they are not attack birds. Their feet are made for walking, not grasping prey, and while their beak is strong and deft and could potentially rip out a dog’s rib, vultures are, as a rule, peaceable birds. They are mainly here to clean up the mess made by other animals dying.

Vultures (also called buzzards) are not intestinally hampered by the bacteria, disease or filth that is a reliable (some would say delectable) part of their diet. When they are finished with their meals, they defecate on their own feet to “wash” them clean of whatever gory carrion they were most recently dining on top of. I learned all of this while eating breakfast. Which is why I did not see the arrival of the second vulture.

I won’t lie: I was not charmed by the arrival of the first vulture the way I am by the adorable little chipmucks who scamper around and underneath the rocks in our yard, or by the deer who find their way onto our deck and then look shocked and appalled when we appear. But we live in the woods, and so the occasional run-in with woodland creatures, including, I suppose, vultures, is to be expected. But being as vultures are rich in lore and symbolism, two of them seemed like—pardon the pun—overkill.

Even so, I was prepared to tuck the whole experience away as a weird and freaky occurrence and then trot it out for interesting speculation at my next dinner outing with friends. As I made my way upstairs to my office, I rehearsed what I might tell them.

“Had two vultures come to my house!” I would say. Then I would regale them with my vast knowledge re: how vultures can eat almost anything and their stomach acid will break it down (in contrast to my husband, who has the digestive system of a thirteen-year-old girl and has been known to fall ill just by thinking about falling ill). Also I’d explain to our friends how vultures are good for the environment because they eat dead animals that would otherwise rot and spread disease to insects and other animals, which could in turn spread disease to us. I would tell them this right when our food arrived.

Just as I was imagining our friends retching and then commending me on my wealth of vulture facts, I became aware of a tap-tap-tapping on my office window. Three feet from my desk, eyeing me demonically but knocking politely, there stood a vulture on the windowsill. Was it one of the two I’d already seen? Or was it a third? At this point I felt it hardly mattered whether I could ID the birds as also-rans or newbies to the party. What seemed to be happening was that I was being given a sign.

Now as a rule, I like signs. I like the idea that the world is communicating with me via a clever little puzzle that I must decode. How dull it would be if everything were straightforward, if butterflies just meant some cocoons had hatched nearby instead of that peace was on the way; or if bluebird sightings just meant you’d stuck a bluebird house in your yard and they were using it, instead of them being a precursor to happiness; or if fortune cookie messages really meant whatever gibberish they say, instead of what you in your infinite wisdom know them to mean?

The problem with vultures, though, is that the whole “what they signify” evidence is all over the place. They are either harbingers of death or patience. Either they foretell of personal, world-shaking events to come, or they suggest mere resourcefulness. Maybe they are symbolic of rebirth! No one really knows!

So thanks to everything being up in the air around vulture lore, I can’t stop scanning my environment. With every minute that goes by, I wonder whether the next minute will be the one in which I or someone I know dies, or whether I am in fact demonstrating the kind of patience worthy of a vulture sighting, or what my world-shaking event is going to be, and when it is going to happen, and whether it will be a good world-shaking event or a bad one.

On my way to pickleball, I wonder: is this traffic jam testing my patience? I win my first game of the day and I think, was that world-shaking? The dead squirrel I passed on the road—did I know it? Was it the one swinging tree to tree in our yard? Will it be reborn in the morning?

It’s exhausting, this not-knowing, and my research provided no clues as to how much time generally passes between a vulture sighting and whatever it signifies, to reveal itself. I am completely in the dark here, and for an undetermined amount of time.

It’s what they call, according to my research, buzzard’s luck.