The day I decided to join the TherapyCorp™ waiting list, I'd spent four hours trapped in my apartment's vestibule, unable to decide if I should hold the door for a neighbor who was still technically visible but realistically too far away. We'd performed an awkward distance-closing dance until the sun set and we both retreated to our respective homes, defeated. This was the moment I realized I needed professional help.

My sister Lisa called me at three in the morning, which meant she was either dying or had just watched the Academy Awards. "Did you see what that actress was wearing?" she asked, her voice trembling with what I can only describe as recreational outrage. "Two hundred thousand dollars for a dress she'll wear once, while my kid's math teacher is buying pencils with her own money."

When my sister Amy called to tell me she'd found our mother's old recipe box while cleaning out her basement, I was in the middle of reading an article about pattern recognition in the human brain. The kind of article that makes you feel superior for reading it, until you realize you've absorbed exactly none of it. The timing wasn't lost on me - here I was, trying to understand why humans see meaning in randomness, while simultaneously wanting to believe that finding Mom's recipes exactly three years after her passing, to the day, meant something profound.

Mother used to tell me that before the Big Building Boom, people actually walked on dirt. Real dirt! Not the composite-engineered-soil-substitute we keep in those sad little window boxes, but authentic, straight-from-the-ground dirt that supposedly went on for miles.

Three years ago, I moved to Salem - not the witch trial one, the other one - after fleeing San Francisco’s increasingly hostile rental market and increasingly friendly street crime. While most people worry about black cats crossing their paths in a town like this, I found myself preoccupied with another dark harbinger: crows.