I stopped telling them when Bear came to the back deck, swatting the bird feeders, scattering seed like spilled time, then extending his heavy paw and asking if I wanted to dance. I know what I saw—that flickering light in his irises, the same one that had been there since his cataract surgery. I know what I heard—that guttural sound deep in his throat when he laughed, usually at his own corny jokes.
The kids didn’t believe me when I told them about Bear. How I recognized him on the trail cam at 3 a.m., when sleep wouldn’t come and the dark was too loud. How his dance moves startled me, made me lean closer to the small glowing screen on my nightstand. How I knew it was him because of that signature move. You know—the lawn-mower-pull-the-cord thing their dad always did at weddings, hips jerking, one arm yanking air, waiting for the laugh before he’d commit to the bit.
It wasn’t him, Ma, they said, shaking their heads, tsk-tsk on their tongues, as if their knowledge of my husband of sixty-two years surpassed mine. As if decades of watching that man move through rooms, through moods, through me, could be reduced to grainy footage and common sense. I heard them whispering on the porch: early-onset, MRI, for her own good.
My eldest son yelled into the kitchen, Ma, his dance was called the weed eater, not the lawn mower! He was born a smart-ass—more ass than smart. No one argued with that. What does he know about my life? What do any of them know about a marriage that lasted longer than they’ve been alive? About how a husband is a bear, and a bear is love wrapped in fur and paws and muscle memory.
Every night for the last three months, I got up at two a.m. I combed my silver strands into a loose bun the way he liked it—said I looked like a sexy librarian. I spritzed my neck with the perfume he bought me last Christmas, the bottle still heavy with scent. I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders—the cashmere one he left on my desk whenever I stayed up late grading my students’ papers. His note said, Beloved, may this wrap you in warm love, until you come back to bed. If only I could rewind time.
After the funeral, it was the little things that hurt the most. I fretted over his dirty laundry for weeks. Should I wash it, fold it, put it in the drawers on his side of the dresser? Should I give his truck to my son, take it to the shop for an oil change, drive it to church on Sundays like we always did? And the mattress with all that empty space, the shape of him permanently indented in foam—would I ever sleep through another night?
It’s 2:49 a.m., and I’m awake, smoothing the dent that was him with my hands, waiting for him to appear on the trail cam. Sometimes he waves. Sometimes he just stands there, breath fogging the lens. Always, eventually, he rises onto his hind legs and twirls, his grizzly hips making circles like a hula hoop. That always makes me laugh, the bright sound too sharp for this quiet house.
It takes exactly nine minutes for his padded paws to lumber from the pines at the edge of our property to our bedroom window. He taps three times. Once for yesterday, once for today, and once for tomorrow, he says when I open the window to give him a kiss on his wet nose. All day I daydream of those three taps, followed by warm breath on the glass and the familiar growl that settles me.
Sometimes I feel a sharp pain under my ribs, my mind racing with questions I’m afraid to ask. What if it’s the joy that isn’t real? What if happiness is a dream? What will happen when winter comes? Bears don’t come out in the cold, dark days of winter.
When the sun goes to sleep each night, I watch the pink light peek through the pines, and I hold his bathrobe, his eyeglasses—anything I can run my fingers across—to ground me. I choose the joy night after night. I sit in his recliner, finish reading the novel he left on his nightstand. I drink a shot of his whiskey, smoke one of his cigars.
One night he came to the window an hour late. I sat twisting the bedsheets into a knot until I heard the first tap. He offered no apology, no explanation. Three days later, he arrived late again, and this time he didn’t rattle the bird feeder, didn’t ask me to dance with him. One night, as he stood under the porch light, I saw that his fur had thinned, a bare patch of rough skin exposed. As he turned to go, I noticed something was different about his gait—not loping as usual, but slower, almost a crawl.
Once he appeared two hours later than usual. I turned on the TV to watch a rerun of our favorite show until I heard the taps. There were only two—one for yesterday and one for today.
Then came the morning I awoke as the sun filtered through my bedroom window, squares of golden light laid carefully across the hardwood floor—the same boards that still creak in the places he used to step. Panic moved from the clock by my bed—6:37—to the window and back again, my chest tightening with each glance. Had I slept through his visit? Had he come and gone, tapping, waiting, deciding I no longer need him? Or worse—he no longer needed me.
I sat there a long time, shawl clutched around my shoulders though the room was already warm, listening to the house breathe without him. Outside, the bird feeders hung still. No tracks marked the dirt beneath the window. I checked the batteries in the trail cam, but it was completely empty—no batteries, no SD card.
I can’t tell the kids. They won’t understand. They’ll worry I’m losing my mind, beg me again to move in with one of them. The house is too much, Ma, they say. You shouldn’t be alone. But they don’t know that I haven’t been alone at all. Until now.
They don’t know what I know—that grief is a bear who doesn’t just vanish. His long goodbye is full of mercy—one less tap, the smell of pine sap fading slowly, every day a little less of the damp earth and musky perfume. Every day a lesson on living with less.
The first snow of the season fell last night. I awoke at midnight to a blanket of quiet over the ground where birdseed had once been scattered. The feeders were full, the snow beneath untouched. I pressed my face against the cold glass of my bedroom window and tapped my finger three times, each tap stronger than the last.
Wrapped in the warm love of my lavender shawl, I poured myself a shot of whiskey and danced barefoot under a full moon. Then I went back to bed.
Tracie Adams, a retired educator and playwright, writes flash fiction and memoir from her farm in rural Virginia. She is the author of two essay collections, Our Lives in Pieces and Not Finished Yet. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best of the Net, longlisted at Wigleaf Top 50, and published widely in literary magazines including Cleaver, Dishsoap Quarterly, SoFloPoJo, Fictive Dream, and more. Visit tracieadamswrites.com and follow her on X @1funnyfarmAdams.
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