The Pattern Seekers
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.
"You'll never believe what else," Amy said, her voice carrying that particular tone of wonder reserved for ghost stories and lottery wins. "The first recipe I pulled out was for her sugar cookies. Remember how she'd only make them when it snowed?"
I did remember. What I didn't tell Amy was that I'd just finished baking a batch of sugar cookies myself, following a recipe I'd found online that promised to taste "just like grandma's." They didn't, of course. Nothing ever does.
The human brain, according to the article I wasn't really reading, is hardwired to find patterns. It's how our ancestors knew when to plant crops and which berries wouldn't kill them. But something happens when you lose someone - suddenly every coincidence feels like a message. The song that was playing at her funeral comes on the radio just as you're thinking about her. Her favorite cardinal appears at your window the morning of her birthday. You find yourself baking sugar cookies on the first snow of the year without realizing why.
"Do you think she's trying to tell us something?" Amy asked, her voice small and hopeful.
I thought about the article, about how it would explain away these moments as nothing more than our pattern-seeking brains doing what they've evolved to do. But I also thought about Mom, who believed that coincidences were just God's way of remaining anonymous, and who would have loved nothing more than to know her children were thinking about her sugar cookies at the same moment, three years after she'd made her last batch.
"I think," I said, looking at my own imperfect cookies cooling on the counter, "she's telling us we need to get these recipes right."
Amy laughed, and I could hear her shuffling through the box. "Well, then we better get started. But bro" - she paused, and I knew she was smiling - "isn't it funny how things work out sometimes?"
It was funny, I supposed, how the universe occasionally arranges itself into these perfect little moments of synchronicity. Whether they mean anything or not is beside the point. Sometimes it's enough just to notice them, to let them remind you that even in a world of chaos and random chance, patterns emerge. Like sugar cookies on snow days, or siblings thinking of their mother at the same moment, or the way certain memories wait patiently in old recipe boxes, ready to be found exactly when you need them.
