The Riddle of Years

Margaret sat on her porch swing, the dried palm frond from her 1972 honeymoon pressed between the pages of the photo album. Fifty years later, the brittle leaf still held the ghost of the Giza pyramids where she and Henry had stood, young and foolish, watching the Sphinx stare impassively across millennia.

"You know what that old cat taught me?" she'd told her granddaughter last week, pointing to the photograph. "The Sphinx knew the answer to her own riddle all along. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, three in evening? Life itself."

The girl had rolled her eyes—teenagers—but Margaret had seen something register. The wisdom of age, slow-ripened like summer peaches.

Henry was gone now, five years this autumn. But sometimes, usually during summer thunderstorms, she still felt that lightning-bolt clarity of the moment he first kissed her under the Egyptian stars. His hand had been rough, calloused from working the auto shop, but gentle when he cupped her face. The way her own father had held her when she was small, the way her grandson now reached for her hand crossing busy streets.

She traced the lines on her own palm—those deepening rivers that had once been smooth plains. Her mother used to read palms at church socials, mostly for fun, mostly getting it wrong. "You'll travel far," she'd promised nine-year-old Margaret. And she had, though not in ships or planes. She'd traveled through raising three children, nursing a dying mother, losing her husband, learning to live alone in a house that echoed with memories.

The storm broke now, rain streaking the porch screens. Thunder rumbled like an old man clearing his throat. Margaret closed the album gently, like laying a sleeping child to bed. Some riddles you never quite solved, and some lightning strikes—well, they illuminate everything forever.