THE CHINESE CONSIDER the owl to be a cateagle: Part cat, part eagle, it is a bird believed to possess vast and enviable qualities. I remember learning about its Chinese heritage sixteen years ago in this season as I awaited the adoption of our daughter.

At the time I was reading Amy Tan’s “The Hundred Secret Senses,” in which cateagle figures prominently. I loved the image, the qualities ascribed to the bird, the name itself. Cateagle. It seemed so brave.

Being brave about adopting was not something that came naturally to me. And we were adopting in China so my anxiety was increased by the distance, the cultural gulf between all of us. How would this really go, I wondered? I knew parenting was hard work but would it be harder with a baby not my own? How much did that mean to me? There was no ruler for this, only instinct and instinct can be a frail as it is mighty.

Then one snowy night my husband and I were driving very slowly along a rural road and were abruptly halted in our way by a white owl descending through the falling snow and landing fifteen feet in front of our car. The bird simply stared into the headlights as all around us the snow swirled. No one else came along on the road and so we sat there, two humans pressed up against the windshield, the beautiful big bird gazing back at us with a steadiness I can still feel today.

Maybe we sat for five minutes. Maybe it was only two. But we looked and the magnificent bird looked back and then after a while, gathering all the snow beneath those great wings, the cateagle lifted into the air, right into the snow and swooped off into the night.

“She’s coming,” I said to my husband through my tears. “She’s really coming.” And I knew for certain that no matter what, it was our little girl who was on her way to our hearts and home.

We left for China soon after and on February 6, 1996 were met our daughter. On Valentine’s Day we arrived back in New York.

Every year we celebrate the day we met. We had to commemorate it. Of course, our first instinct was to throw a party but that soon seemed wrong. There was something about our anniversary that called for quiet and simple togetherness. It seemed that this only required a party of three.

We don’t do much on what we have taken to calling Family Day: Dinner at home together, some talking about how much we love one another, how grateful we are and invariably I call our daughter my little cateagle and she smiles, indulging me as she always does when I see or hear an owl or just want to remind her what she means to me. And after I get teary and my husband and daughter get to roll their eyes at me just long enough, we climb onto the couch and look at pictures.

On that very first anniversary, when our daughter was 18 months old, my husband suggested that we get out the photo album and begin a tradition we keep every year by telling the story of her adoption to our daughter. The first time the photos were little more than something to drool over but as the years have passed they have taken on the power that only pictures of such an event can have: There are my husband and me taking the train, the two of us in a garden, the two of us at a hotel. And then there are three and nothing has ever been the same since.