The Sphinx by the Pool

Martha sat on her back porch, the morning sun warming her arthritis-stiffened knees. Her orange tabby, Oliver, wound around her legs like living honey. At 82, she'd learned that the smallest rituals keep you anchored to yourself.

She arranged her daily pills on the lace doily her daughter had made—multivitamins, calcium, and that little white tablet her doctor insisted upon. The vitamin bottle caught the light, prism-like against the faded morning.

The swimming pool below shimmered. Empty now, but in thirty years it had hosted birthdays, graduations, three generations of cannonballs and first kisses. Arthur used to sit right there, in that green Adirondack chair, watching their children learn to float.

Arthur had been her sphinx, always with a riddle instead of a greeting. "What has roots as nobody sees, is taller than trees, up, up it goes, and yet never grows?" he'd asked when they first met, somehow knowing she'd been teaching mountain mythology to sixth graders for twenty years.

She missed how his forehead would wrinkle when he was thinking, his deep-set eyes holding secrets he'd only reveal at dinner parties, usually after his third glass of wine. He'd pose impossible questions about the nature of friendship or the shape of happiness, then listen with that sphinx-like stillness as guests argued themselves into knots.

Oliver leaped onto her lap, purring like a small engine. Old cat, creaky joints like hers. They made a fine pair.

Martha swallowed her vitamins with sweet tea. The pool reflected the sky like a mirror for giants. Her granddaughter was bringing her great-grandson next week—first time he'd see the water. Arthur would have loved that, the continuity of it, how life pools and deepens even as it flows forward.

"You old sphinx," she whispered to the empty chair. The riddle he'd left her with, years ago, suddenly made sense: What grows stronger when shared?

The answer was everywhere, really—in the pool that held three generations of joy, in the friend who still made her laugh from the grave, in the cat who needed her as much as she needed him.

Love. That was the riddle's answer, and its question both.