The Fox at Margaret's Pool

Margaret always said life was like a papaya—hard and unyielding on the outside, but soft and sweet if you had the patience to let it ripen. We were twelve then, sitting by her father's pool on that July afternoon when everything shimmered with possibility.

The pool had seen better days, even then. Its plaster was peeling like sunburned skin, but to us it was an ocean. Margaret's family had planted papaya in the greenhouse—exotic, curious things that smelled like summer itself. We'd eat them with our fingers, sticky and sweet, dangling our feet in water that turned our toes into prunes.

'Someday,' Margaret said, 'we'll be old ladies drinking tea and remembering this pool.' She said it with certainty, as if she'd already seen it in some vision only she could access.

That's when the fox appeared.

He came every afternoon at four—a russet shadow slipping through the hedge. Not young, not old, just patient. He'd sit at the pool's edge and watch us, intelligent amber eyes taking inventory of two girls who thought they owned the world.

'He's my friend,' Margaret declared. 'He comes to check on us.'

I laughed. 'Foxes don't have friends.'

'This one does.' She tossed him a piece of papaya. He caught it mid-air, dainty despite his wildness. 'He knows something we don't.'

That fox visited every summer for five years. We grew up around him—through first loves and heartbreaks, through college acceptances and rejections, through the quiet deaths of grandparents and the noisy births of nieces and nephews. And every summer, there was papaya, and there was the pool, and there was the fox.

Margaret died last winter. She was eighty-two, still eating papaya until the end. I went to the house one last time to help her daughter sort through things.

The pool was gone, filled in years ago for a garden. But in the corner, beneath the old papaya tree, another fox appeared—not the same one, of course, but his great-grandson perhaps. He sat watching me with the same amber eyes, patient as ever.

He came for papaya, I realized. Margaret had kept the tradition alive all these years.

I sat on the bench and shared my papaya with him. The sweetness was exactly as I remembered. Some things, after all, don't change—they just ripen.