The Riddle in the Workshop

Martha pushed open the shed door, hinges groaning like old joints. Inside, dust motes danced in shafts of afternoon light, and there it still sat after all these years—her husband Arthur's wooden sphinx, its carved smile forever enigmatic. Fifty years ago, he'd whittled it by hand during his lunch breaks, saying every marriage needed its riddles.

She'd asked him once why he'd chosen a sphinx of all things. He'd tapped that knowing wooden face and said, "Because the best answers aren't solutions, sweetheart. They're the questions worth asking."

Now, outside, her seven-year-old grandson Leo was running laps around the oak tree with Buster, the family's golden retriever, both of them breathless and joyous, lost in a game only they understood. Leo would grow up, as children do. Time had a way of running faster with each passing year, carrying babies toward their own lives.

Martha remembered Arthur standing right here in this doorway, watching their own children run with the family dog they'd had back then—Max was his name. "You know," he'd said, "a dog doesn't run because he's chasing something. He runs because running itself is the point."

She'd laughed and called him a philosopher. He'd shrugged and said, "Just a man who's learned that the sphinx's real riddle isn't what you think it is."

"What is it, then?" she'd asked.

He'd smiled—the same knowing smile carved into that wooden face. "The riddle is how to love something enough to let it run."

Martha traced the sphinx's painted eyes with her arthritic thumb. Leo would have questions, someday, about the grandfather he'd barely remember. She'd have to decide which answers to give him, which riddles to let him solve himself.

Outside, Leo collapsed onto the grass, Buster flopping beside him, both of them panting and grinning at nothing in particular. They weren't running toward anything. They were just running.

Martha smiled. Maybe that was the answer all along.