Riddles by the Pool

Eleanor sat on the wrought-iron bench, watching seven-year-old Leo crouch by the garden pool. Her knees ached—a reminder that she was eighty-two, not the girl who once swam across Lake Michigan without stopping. The goldfish drifted lazily through the water, orange flashes against the blue tiles, unchanged from summer to summer.

"Grandma?" Leo asked, poking the water with a twig. "Were you ever scared?"

Eleanor smiled. The question caught her off guard, but perhaps it shouldn't have. Children sensed things—the way she moved more slowly now, like her father in his final years, shuffling through the house like a little zombie before dawn, searching for words he'd misplaced.

"I was scared the first time I rode a bull," she said.

Leo's eyes widened. "You rode a BULL?"

"At the county fair, when I was sixteen. It lasted three seconds. I hit the dirt so hard I couldn't breathe straight for a week. Your grandfather laughed until he cried. Said I had more stubbornness than sense."

The garden statue of the sphinx watched them both, its stone face weathered by sixty Minnesota winters. Eleanor's husband had bought it as a joke—"For all your riddles, Ellie," he'd said. Now he was gone, and the riddles had multiplied.

"What's the riddle today?" Leo asked, as if reading her thoughts. She'd taught him the game years ago, passing on what her mother had taught her: every day brings a question, and wisdom is learning you don't need all the answers.

"The sphinx asks," Eleanor said softly, "what stays gold but doesn't glitter? What lives in water but isn't wet? What remembers everything you've forgotten?"

Leo frowned, thinking. The goldfish rose to the surface, mouth opening and closing in silent bubbles.

"Memory?" he guessed.

Eleanor reached over and patted his hand. "Close enough."

They sat together as the afternoon lengthened, the old woman and the boy, the goldfish circling their small world. Some things, she thought, you don't need to solve. You just need to witness them, again and again, until they become part of you.