What the Garden Sphinx Knows

Every morning, I place my vitamin on the tongue—same little white tablet as yesterday, as last decade—and wash it down with thoughts that grow heavier each year. At eighty-two, you collect things: regrets, triumphs, the peculiar sort of wisdom that only arrives when you no longer have the energy to apply it.

My granddaughter Sofia, twelve years old and convinced the world holds secrets she alone can unlock, visits my garden each Tuesday. She stands before the cracked cement sphinx I've had since 1973—a yard sale find from when such things were considered charming rather than cursed—and she whispers questions to its chipped face.

"What's the riddle?" she asks it, and it answers in the language of pigeons and weathered stone.

Last week, she brought me a papaya from the market down on 4th Street—where the Italian grocer used to sell pepperocini and my husband would bargain for the perfect melon. "For you, Nonna," she said, "because you said you missed the taste of summers that don't exist anymore."

I cut it open. The flesh was the exact orange of 1964, of a kitchen in Queens where my mother taught me that sweetness must be earned, not given. I wept over that papaya while Sofia watched, uncertain whether to comfort me or let grief finish its work. Some lessons are too large for words.

But it was yesterday, watching her play padel with her brother in the driveway—laughing, fierce, sun catching the brown of their skin—that I understood what the sphinx has been trying to tell me all these years.

The riddle isn't about what you keep. It's about what you give away.

I called them over, handed them both half of the papaya. "This was your great-grandmother's recipe," I lied, smiling. "She made it with patience and with love."

And in that moment, the sphinx seemed to nod. Some riddles answer themselves, if you live long enough to let them.