The Bear in the Window

Margaret found him in the back of the cedar chest, wrapped in a yellowed dishtowel still smelling of lavender. Button, her childhood bear, his brown fur worn to velvet in the places she'd most often stroked: his ears, his paws, the spot right over his heart where she'd pressed her face through countless thunderstorms.

He'd been a gift from Sarah—her first friend, the girl who'd shared her desk and her lunchbox all through third grade. Sarah who'd moved away when they were twelve, leaving Margaret with nothing but this bear and a lifetime of letters that spanned seven decades.

Now, at seventy-eight, Margaret sat on her bedroom floor, Button in her lap, as water from the afternoon rain lapped against the windowpane. The sound took her back to Lake Superior, 1958, where her grandmother had taught her to skip stones and promised that everything worth knowing could be learned by watching water move.

She opened Button's hidden pocket—a secret compartment her mother had sewn into his side—and extracted the small glass bottle she'd placed there sixty years ago. Vitamin pills, calcium tablets, the daily regimen her doctor prescribed now. But as a child, she'd filled this bottle with tiny treasures: a robin's egg shell, a four-leaf clover pressed flat, a dried palm frond from the family's only trip to Florida.

The palm had meant something else back then: the lines etched in her grandmother's hand, the future she'd promised to read in those creases. "You'll live long," she'd said, tracing Margaret's lifeline. "Long enough to see your children's children."

And here Margaret was, living that prophecy. Her granddaughter Emma would be here any minute, bringing the great-grandbabies for tea. Margaret placed the vitamin bottle back in Button's pocket, patted his worn head, and smiled. Some wisdom you learned from water. Some you found in the palm of a hand that held yours through the years. And some, she realized as she heard Emma's key in the lock, came wrapped in brown fur and given by a friend who'd loved you enough to know exactly what you needed.