The Riddle of Years

Margaret sat on her porch swing, the old golden **dog** Barnaby resting his chin on her slippered feet. At eighty-two, she had learned that the best company often needed no words.

"Grandma?" Seven-year-old Leo stood before her, holding a ceramic **sphinx** figurine from her mantle—something she'd picked up in Egypt forty years ago, when Arthur was still alive and the world felt wide open.

"Why does the sphinx have no nose?" Leo asked, eyes bright with the curiosity of the young.

Margaret smiled, thinking of the riddle she'd asked her own grandmother once. "The sphinx keeps secrets, Leo. Some things get worn away by time, but what matters remains."

She thought of the **papaya** tree she and Arthur had planted in their backyard when they were first married—how it had borne fruit for thirty years, sweet and abundant, until a drought claimed it. They'd eaten papaya every Sunday morning, the juice running down their chins, laughing like children. Arthur had taught her that patience bears the sweetest fruit.

In the garden, the wind **palm** she'd planted as a sapling now towered over the house, its fronds whispering stories in the breeze. She remembered pressing her palm against Arthur's weathered hand on their fiftieth anniversary, the lines etched like rivers mapping where they'd been together.

"Time is like **water**," she told Leo, touching his smooth, unlined cheek. "It flows through everything, wearing down the sharp edges, carrying what matters to the sea."

Barnaby sighed in his sleep, dreaming of rabbits long past. Margaret realized she was the sphinx now—keeper of stories, protector of wisdom, weathered but standing still. The riddle wasn't in the question, but in the living.

"Your grandpa," she said softly, "used to say that what we leave behind isn't monuments or money. It's the papaya trees we plant for others to harvest."

Leo nestled beside her, and together they watched the sunset paint the sky in colors Arthur would have loved. Some riddles, Margaret decided, answer themselves in the asking.