On my thirty-seventh birthday, I celebrate with my usual long run, during which I will undoubtedly pass by some farm animals.  I always manage to either live or work in a town within running distance of farm animals, horses, cows, bison, perhaps some quail.  Luckily, my school is near a large body of water, which to us water sign babies is always a renewing sight. During the second mile, as I close in upon the banks of the Salmon River, five deer cross my path, unmolested by truck or tractor. On the thrilling downhill portion of the run from the high school in Moodus to the Connecticut riverfront village of East Haddam, very few vehicles pass me, this being a low-traffic town at a low-traffic time of day. As I leave the village, the uphill portion of my run thrills me in a different way as I pant smugly up the hill, thinking how a woman possessing thinner thighs would not be trotting upward and onward through mile six, but walking on her rare, thin catwalk limbs, useless in the face of such an incline. As the route levels out in the last mile, I slow down enough to count the cows chomping away at the tall haystack in the center of their metal pen. Ten fawn colored cows, twice as many domestic as wild creatures. Why should these cows echo the whitetails?  What signs have appeared on your birthday? If you wrote them down, I hope that you too will share them too!