Waiting

September 2, 1862

The sun shone hot above the sleepy town of Naperville, slowly withering the crops in the fields and drying out the puddles from last night’s storm. Mary sat on her porch in her lightest summer gown, listening to the cicadas’ buzzing tremolo and mending a pair of her husband’s socks. The heat was so intense it made waves on the horizon reflecting off the windows of the houses; even the horses in the streets seemed to beg for relief, too hot even to flick their tails to ward off flies. Mary barely noticed the heat, nor did she register the motion of the needle in her steady hands. Her mind was preoccupied: she was waiting for a letter.

Her son Robert had been gone for six months now, drafted to fight in the war against the rebels in the South. The mail trains came infrequently and the soldiers often had no time for letters, but Robert wrote to his mother as often as he could. Mary missed him dearly; he was her youngest child and her only son, just seventeen years old when the army came through town. Her other three daughters had each married farmers from neighboring towns, and although they came to visit as often as they could, it was nearing harvest time and there was work to be done at home. Now it was just Mary and her husband living in the old home by the river, maintaining their dairy farm and waiting for news about the war.

Mary did not know that her last letter from Robert sat on a table by the fireplace. She did not know she had read that letter many times already, and replied to it in depth. She knew nothing of the battle at Bull Run earlier that week, nothing of the Confederate bullet that had wounded her son, nothing of the surgeon that could not save him. Soon an officer would arrive by train with a flag and a grave face, informing Mary that she had joined the ranks of mothers who had lost a child to the war. Soon Mary would be surrounded by grieving friends and relatives reminding her that the President had said this war would not be without its sacrifices. Now, however, Mary sat on her porch in the late summer heat blissfully unaware of the dark events to come. She sat peacefully, contentedly, mending her husband’s sock and listening to the ever-present buzz of cicadas, waiting for a letter.