The Riddle of Summers Past

Every morning at seventy-three, Martha laid out her pills like offerings at an altar—the little white vitamin C tablet, the calcium shaped like a tiny bone, the prescription bottles lined with military precision. Some rituals, she'd learned, only deepen with age.

On the mantelpiece, the brass sphinx her granddaughter had brought from Egypt watched her with enigmatic eyes. The figurine had belonged to Martha's mother, then to Martha herself, and now its silent presence spanned three generations of women who had puzzled over its secrets.

"You never told me the riddle," her friend Eleanor had whispered on her deathbed last spring. They'd been swimming together at the community pool since the Nixon administration, their weekly laps growing slower as the decades unspooled. Eleanor, with her mermaid-white hair and laughter that echoed off the tiled walls, had been the sister Martha never had.

Martha's thoughts drifted to 1952, to that summer at Lake Winnipesaukee when she was twelve. The morning she'd swum out too far, exhausted and panicking, until something massive had nudged her back toward shore. For years she'd sworn it was a bear—a swimming bear, impossible as that sounded—until her father had gently explained it was likely a playful otter or beaver. But some magic, she'd decided, shouldn't be explained away.

Now she picked up the sphinx, its brass warmed by sunlight through the window. The ancient Egyptians had believed the sphinx guarded knowledge, protected wisdom. Perhaps that was what old age was—a becoming sphinx-like, carrying riddles and answers alike in the same breath.

Her granddaughter would visit tomorrow. Martha would teach her to swim in the backyard pool, would show her the old photograph of two grinning girls at the lake, would give her the sphinx and say, "Some questions take a lifetime to answer."

The vitamin C disappeared with a sip of tea. Outside, the summer sun cast long shadows across the garden. Life, Martha decided, wasn't about solving every riddle. It was about learning which ones deserved a lifetime's contemplation, and which could simply be enjoyed as mysteries—like swimming bears, eternal friendships, and the quiet grace of becoming someone's answer to a prayer they hadn't yet thought to offer.