Cape Cod Morning-1950

    This house, my house now, is the most wonderful house in the world. I didn’t think so when I was younger. I thought it was gloomy and a little bit scary. It is an old house, the one I grew up in, and the one my father grew up in, and his father before him. Mama and Papa, moved to a little apartment in Boston. Mama has always wanted to live in the city, they moved just last year.

    I love standing here at the window in the parlor, especially in the morning. It’s been so long since I have, almost seven years. I always loved this window. William did too. Almost every morning we would come downstairs and stand by the window while Mama put breakfast on the table. In the spring we would open it, just a crack and listen for bird songs and see if we could smell Mama’s flower garden. In the summer we would watch for chipmunks and squirrels and see who could spot the most. In the fall we would try to count all the leaves that fell off the trees. My favorite was in the winter, when you couldn’t see out the window. When the window was covered in frost we would look for pictures in the ice. Even after we started growing up, we still kept looking for frost pictures.

    When I was fifteen and William was seventeen, the world went to war. Suddenly, those frost pictures weren’t so important to William, but they were still important to me. When he turned eighteen, he enlisted. On the day he left home, I stood by that window at 4:30 in the morning and cried. Frost was covering the entire window, but I wasn’t looking for angels or peacocks locked in the ice. I was thinking, thinking of all the times that William and I had stood at that window and laughed, and all the times William had put his arm around my shoulder and said, “Patty, I think that frost,” or birds, or leaves, or flowers, depending on which season it was, ”is God’s way of telling us that everything is alright.” No sooner than I thought William’s words to myself, I felt an arm around my shoulder.

    “Patty, I think that frost is God’s way of telling us that everything is alright.” I looked up, and William was standing there, right beside me. The only difference was that he was wearing a uniform now, and not pajamas. “Look at that frost. What do you see?”

    “I don’t know.”

    “You know what I see? I see a deer. You know, all these years we’ve looked out the window, we’ve never once seen a deer. I always kind of wished we would. But look, doesn’t that look like a deer to you? See his antlers?”

    “Yeah, I see it.” He was right; it looked exactly like a deer.

    “Maybe that’s a sign. You know Indians thought that they all had an animal that represented ‘em. Now, I never put much stock in Indian magic, but maybe there’s something to that. Maybe I’m a deer, well, you know what I mean.”

    William left, but he had made me promise to keep looking for frost pictures. I did, every morning, until one day. One morning in June 1943, one of those horrible brown government cars came. They told us the worst, the impossible. William had been killed in the service of his country. After that I didn’t look for frost pictures anymore. I couldn’t look at that window without crying.

    I moved out, and went to college near the end of the war. I only just moved back in. Mama and Papa didn’t want to sell the house, so I moved in. I moved in without a second thought, but I still refused to look out that window. I even went so far as to keep that window closed and covered all the time.

    Then, this morning, I awoke to a sort of voice. It told me that I needed to go to that window. There was no frost, but I needed to go all the same. I went, even though I didn’t want to. I pulled up the shade and looked out for the first time in seven years. I saw something I had never seen before. There, standing not even ten yards from the house was a deer. I opened the window as far as it would go. I leaned out and breathed in fresh air. The deer looked at me, and I looked at it, and I knew that that was William’s way of telling me that everything was alright.

    Thank you, William.