My state held primary elections today. That meant doing my civic duty and casting my ballot for the candidates I want to see in the big election in November. I had a surprisingly difficult time making my choices. This year — in response to so many Awful Things being done in the name of Awful People — there were a host of excellent candidates, from Senator to City Council to School Board.

But I did make my choices. And on the way home, I pulled into an antique store. This was a new-to-me store. It’s been around for absolute ages, but I just never had the time or inclination to visit before today. I’m still not sure why I chose today. Maybe I need reassurance — reassurance that humans are capable of making beautiful, weird, fantastic things, and that these expressions of our creativity are worth preserving, and that other people will appreciate and value them.

Maybe I just needed to turn my brain off after a marathon writing weekend and a rough few weeks at work.

Maybe I just needed to stretch my legs.

Maybe all of the above.

Either way, I ended up wandering around the store for a good half-hour. It is a huge structure. A warehouse with great sliding doors and skylights, filled with furniture, vases, tapestries and rugs, posters and prints, old books, old tools, old wood carvings, and so much more.

I turned a corner, and found a display filled with wrought iron statues, figurines, and wall hangings. Curious, I paused to give the wall a closer look. And that’s when I found her.

Angel, the tag said. $22.

Not an angel. So obviously not an angel. The long robe. The torches. For someone whose first love was Greek mythology and the Hellenic pantheon, she is clearly Hekate.

For a long time, Hekate was part of a group of Deities I honored on a regular basis (alongside Hermes and the Charites). She fascinated me. A Goddess who was also a Titan, associated with the sea and the night and the underworld. A liminal being of the crossroads. A Goddess of birth and beginnings, of death and endings. A Mistress of the arcane arts. A singular Goddess, unattached, complete unto herself without need of lover, spouse, or children.

For a young woman taking her first steps away from the faith of her childhood and into polytheism, away from the patriarchy of Christianity and into a modern paganism that promised gender equity (or even preference for the feminine), Hekate was a compelling, hypnotic figure. She was everything I had been warned against as a child, and everything I wanted to be as a grown woman: wise, self-assured, compassionate.

Maintaining my devotions has been difficult lately. I drifted away from regular practices to more seasonal rites, and even then I sometimes failed (too busy, too tired, not in the right headspace).

So I am taking this discovery of Hekate — the Lady of the Keys, She Who Stands at the Threshold — as a sign. Is she really trying to tell me something? Is a Goddess calling out to me? Who knows. The likely answer is “no.” I’m not that important. This is just me reading into a completely coincidental discovery. And I’m okay with that. Because I have missed my regular devotions, my seasonal rites, my golden Gods and their honey-sweet myths and the hymns I wrote in their honor. I have missed Hekate, and Hermes, and the Charites.

Time to dust off my altar.