Running Through Yesterday

Margaret discovered the old teddy bear while cleaning out the cedar chest, its fur worn smooth from decades of gentle handling. Franklin, she'd called him—a companion through childhood summers when the world stretched endless and golden.

That same afternoon, her phone rang. It was Dorothy, calling from the retirement community in Arizona, her voice still carrying that familiar lisp from when they'd been running together through the Vermont meadows at age twelve, bare feet striking dew-kissed grass, racing toward nowhere because everywhere lay ahead.

"Remember Mr. Henderson's sphinx?" Dorothy asked suddenly. "The statue in his garden, the one with that riddle about what walks on four legs then two then three?"

Margaret laughed, a warm sound that surprised even her. "The day you tried to answer it and said 'a dog with arthritis.' Mr. Henderson nearly choked on his tea."

"We were such wise fools," Dorothy said, and Margaret closed her eyes, remembering how they'd lain in her bedroom, Franklin the bear propped between them, discussing life's great mysteries: why boys were so confounding, whether they'd ever truly understand their mothers, what legacy they might leave.

They'd been wrong about so much, yet right about what mattered. Dorothy had borne five children, cancer twice, and the loss of her husband Arthur with a grace that still awed Margaret. Margaret herself had carried the weight of infertility, finding purpose in teaching generations of children who'd called her 'Mrs. Thompson' with the same reverence she'd felt for knowledge.

"I still have Franklin," Margaret said softly.

"My sphinx is still in my garden," Dorothy replied. "The grandchildren try to solve it every summer. They always get it wrong too."

And there it was—the thread that bound them across seventy years, through weddings and funerals, through the extraordinary ordinary days that compose a life. The bear, the sphinx, the running girl who still lived somewhere inside her wrinkled skin, and the friend who had witnessed her becoming.

"Next month," Margaret said suddenly. "Arizona. I'll bring Franklin."

"Only if you remember the answer to the sphinx's riddle."

"I never knew it," Margaret admitted, smiling at the ceiling.

"Neither did I," Dorothy said. "But isn't that wonderful?"

Outside her window, the autumn light slanted golden across the garden, just as it had all those years ago when two girls ran through it, certain they'd live forever, never guessing how beautifully wrong they'd be.