I let out a yell and ran to her, afraid she’d had another stroke or broken something in a fall. Just as I reached her, she sat up and her eyes found mine. She gave me a small smile.

“Hello, Collie. What are you yelling for?”

I came up short. She looked well…better than she had since the stroke…and her voice didn’t have the slight slurring lilt I’d had such trouble getting used to in the last few weeks. And Collie? She hadn’t called me that since I was a little girl. It was always “Colleen” with a clipped and almost formal tone.

I realized my mouth was hanging open and I closed it as I knelt down beside her. “You fell or something. I just found you out here. We need to get you to a hospital. Let them check you out.” As I was speaking, she was already standing up and waving me off with a light laugh. Her walker lay discarded in the overgrown ditch nearby and she was showing no signs of needing it.

“No, no need for that. I’m doing okay. I just…” She paused, looking up at the sky for a second before smiling wider and pointing at the mailbox. “I just came out to get the mail…figured I should try and do it myself…and I found that dead mouse in there.” She pointed to the ground near the mailbox post where a fat grey field mouse lay dead. “I picked it up, thinking it wouldn’t bother me to just toss it in the trash, but I guess I’m more…” She paused again, looking up for a moment before continuing. “Squeamish than I realized.” She let out a delighted laugh. “But I’m feeling fine now. Better than fine, really.”

I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or worried, but what she was saying seemed to be true. She talked with sense, I saw no signs of confusion or lack of coordination, and she actually was moving and talking much better than she had before. I watched her carefully the rest of the day, scrutinizing her for any sign of a change, but she continued to move around the house like her old self again.

I’d made her promise to follow up with her doctor the following week, and to let me know if she started feeling the slightest bit odd. She said she would, but that she thought it was just one of those things. “It may be,” she mused, “that picking up that smelly little mouse was just what the doctor ordered.”

We stayed up late that night playing cards, and when I went to bed, I slept better than I had in a long time. I didn’t claim to understand it, but wasn’t that the definition of a miracle? I chided myself to just be grateful and hope that it held.