Angel

I moved back to Milledgeville a little over four years ago. I would say that I moved home, but actually I was born in Atlanta and lived there until I was five or six. This, I know, is splitting hairs because Milledgeville is where I grew up and will always be home. I moved back here after spending about seven years right down the road in Wilkinson County. We lived just outside of Ivey on what was, at that time, my childhood dream farm. A home and almost eighty acres! Taylor went to the public school there and PJ was a stay at home mom. What more could a man want?
Well we all know that dreams have a way of changing once they are given life. Want is what makes us dream, and we both begin to want something else. We had moved there to be closer to my younger brother, but after his death the county just didn’t feel welcoming. I built a new home in Milledgeville and we moved back. We moved from eighty acres in the middle of nowhere to a neighborhood inside the city limit. Talk about change! I spent a large portion of the first year looking out the window at my neighbors cutting their grass, washing their cars and just sitting on their porch. All of this in plain view! They were coming and going like they didn’t know (or care) anybody was watching.
All of this now seems like so long ago.
I was in the area of our old place several times in the previous weeks, so I rode by to take a look. There is a brand new highway that comes within a few miles of our old place, but everything else looked the same. It was like I had gone to the store or maybe a short vacation and was returning home. I didn’t stop. I told myself that I needed to get back to work, but really I had mixed emotions about being in the area, period. My brother has been gone for over eight years, but looking at things that we discovered together made it seem like yesterday.
I’m not a stranger to death. I’ve cried my eyes out at funerals for friends and family, and some I still think about today. I’ve helped choose just the right casket and I held my grandmother’s hand when she took her last breath. My grandfather was one of a kind and hardly a day passes that I don’t wish my daughter had known him like I did. But my brother’s death, for me, was different. When I lost him I was scared. We talked a lot and I pretty much bounced every idea I had off of him before I acted on it. But just losing my voice of reason was not what scared me. I think this was the first time I actually wondered what happened to someone when they died. I understand the biological part, but would he still be around me in spirit? Would he haunt me? Would he leave signs for me so that I would know he was watching over me? Would any of this happen, or was he just gone?
I looked for him everywhere. Every morning I looked out the window overlooking a small field in front of the house. Sometimes I would see deer and turkeys crossing the field, but I never saw him. I half expected (or just plain hoped) that one day I would raise the blinds and he would be crossing the field. He would hesitate just for a second to acknowledge that I had seen him before fading into the wood line. A fake Bigfoot sighting that was too blurry to really tell what was going on. I could image it so clearly that at times I thought that it had happened. It never did.
When I told my family about riding by the old place they got excited. I agreed to ride back there the coming weekend and maybe even get out and look around. I wondered what effect this would have on them, especially my daughter. We had moved there when she was only three years old and she had experienced many “firsts” there. She had seen her daddy at his worst there as well. She arrived as a baby and departed as a young lady.
We got up early Sunday morning and headed to Wilkinson County. The new highway was a shock to both of them, so we traveled its full length before heading up the dirt road to the old place. All three of us put on our hats as we pulled in the drive in front of the locked gate and climbed out of the truck. Luckily the deer flies were not too bad, but we kept our hats on anyway, holding hands as we silently walked down the short drive to the front of the house.
We reached the clearing separating the house and shop and stopped to catch our breaths. The weeds were tall in front of the house and the field that I had kept almost manicured was overgrown nearly head high. Nobody said anything as we each looked at different components of our memories. My eyes were scanning the field when a movement at the wood line caught my eye. My heart fluttered and I dropped my daughter’s hand. I searched for words but none would come. I knew that I should say something because the moment would quickly pass. I somehow managed to point in the general direction of the movement and say “look”. They both turned in the direction of my outstretched arm and gasped. For standing at the end of the field was an almost completely white deer with a large set of chocolate brown antlers. A beacon in the drought burned scrub. An angel.