The Sphinx in Grandmother's Garden

Every Sunday afternoon, I find myself back at Grandmother's house, though the garden has been someone else's for thirty years. In my mind, the concrete sphinx still crouches beside the goldfish pond, its stone face wearing that same inscrutable smile that used to fascinate me as a girl.

Grandmother called him "the silent teacher" and said he'd watched over three generations of our family learn to swim in that tiny pond. "Life's currents will pull you every which way," she'd say, sitting on her favorite bench beneath the palm tree, its fronds casting dancing shadows on her weathered face. "Best learn young how to keep your head above water."

The goldfish—orange flashes darting between water lilies—were her parables. "Look at them, Esther. Born into the same small pond, yet each finds its own way to swim through."

I never solved the sphinx's riddle, whatever it was. But I did learn what Grandmother meant about currents. I swam through marriage and motherhood, through loss and gains I never expected. Now, watching my granddaughter reach into our own fish pond, giggling as a goldfish nips her finger, I understand what the sphinx had been guarding all along.

The wisdom isn't in the answers we chase. It's in the questions we hand down like batons, riddles that live in the curve of a palm tree's shadow, in the way certain afternoons refuse to fade from memory, in the way love somehow swims upstream through time to find us again.

Grandmother's gone, but her sphinx smiles on from my backyard—rescued from a salvage yard, chipped nose and all. And every Sunday, I sit beside my own pond, watching the next generation learn to swim, and whisper to the stone teacher: "I think I finally understand your riddle."

The answer, it seems, was never the point at all.