Summer's Wisdom by the Pool

Seventy-eight years old, and I still find myself drawn to water. Today it's the community pool, where my grandson Toby practices his laps with the determination of youth. I watch from this bench where my arthritis doesn't protest too much, the sun warming my bones like it did sixty years ago in my parents' backyard.

That old above-ground pool was where my brother dared me to swim the entire length underwater. Where Buster, our golden retriever with the patient wisdom of a saint, would bark encouragement from the deck, tail thumping like a metronome. Dogs understand things we spend lifetimes learning — presence, loyalty, the sacredness of simply being there.

Life has become something of a sphinx in these later years. The riddles have changed. Instead of asking who walks on four legs then two then three, it asks: What matters when time grows short? What endures when the body softens?

Some mornings, I confess, I rise like a zombie from old horror films — shuffling, stiff, groaning with the effort. But then Toby telephones, excited about some discovery, and suddenly I'm alive again. Love is the antidote to living death.

The goldfish bowl my husband Arthur kept for forty years sits empty now on my shelf. He'd laugh and say they had seven-second memories, but he never stopped replacing them when they passed. There's comfort in that — in tending to small things, in showing up even for brief lives.

"Grandma!" Toby calls, dripping wet and grinning. "Watch me do a flip turn!"

I nod, thinking how wisdom flows like water — sometimes pooling in quiet places, sometimes rushing forward in unexpected ways. The riddles don't need answers. They just need witnesses.