The Bull Who Taught Me to Swim

Margaret settled into her porch rocker, the rhythmic squeak familiar as breathing. At seventy-eight, afternoons were for remembering, and today's vitamin regimen had sparked something — her father's voice, stubborn as a Missouri mule, calling from across decades.

"You'll learn," he'd said, waist-deep in the creek while she, twelve years old and terrified, clung to the bank. "A bull-headed girl needs bull-headed lessons."

He'd been referring to old Ferdinand, the farm bull who'd once cornered them both against the barn. But that day at the creek, her father had been the bull himself — immovable, patient, standing in the brown water until finally, shivering and furious, she'd waded in.

"That's the way," he'd said, not unkindly. "Life don't wait for you to stop being scared."

Margaret smiled, watching her orange tabby, Pumpkin, stalk a dragonfly through the garden. That cat had more of her father in him than any of her children — ornery, relentless, impossibly affectionate when it suited him.

On the windowsill sat the goldfish bowl, won by her grandson at a carnival last spring. “He needs someone experienced,” the boy had said with solemn gravity, as if goldfish-keeping were some sacred trust passed between generations. Margaret had accepted the charge with appropriate dignity, though she'd secretly hoped it might outlive her — a peculiar kind of legacy, perhaps.

The fish swam lazy circles, oblivious to its role as keeper of memories. Sometimes, watching it, she thought of her first goldfish, won exactly the same way sixty-five years ago, how it had lived three years in a mayonnaise jar on her windowsill, how its death had been her first real lesson about the impermanence of things.

Not that she'd learned it well. Even now, with her morning vitamins lined up like tiny soldiers — calcium for bones that had carried four children, omega-3 for a heart that had loved and broken and healed — she found herself surprised by time's passing.

Pumpkin abandoned the dragonfly and jumped into her lap, purring like a small engine. Margaret stroked his soft head, thinking how strange it was that the bull who'd terrified her had taught her courage, how the goldfish she'd mourned had taught her letting go, how the cat who annoyed her daily taught her patience.

"Well,” she whispered to the empty yard, “didn't I turn out bull-headed after all?”

n

The afternoon sun warmed her face. Somewhere, her father was laughing, waist-deep in some celestial creek, waiting for her to wade in.