What the Sphinx Knew

Margaret sat on her back porch, the cable television humming softly in the background. At seventy-eight, she'd grown rather fond of those Sunday afternoon movies—the kind her granddaughter called "zombie films," though Margaret found them more amusing than frightening. The young ones shuffled about, groaning for brains, while she thought, 'Lord, that's just how my arthritis feels on rainy days.'

A flash of orange caught her eye. A fox, sleek and bold, paused at the edge of her garden, one paw raised as if reconsidering its path. Margaret held her breath, remembering summers swimming in the old quarry with her brother Tommy. They'd been wild as foxes then, diving into water so deep it swallowed sunlight, surfacing with mouths full of laughter and river stones.

That summer, the summer of 1958, Mrs. Higgins had posed them riddles like the Sphinx. 'What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?' Margaret had answered correctly—'A human being!'—and Mrs. Higgins had nodded, as if conferring some ancient wisdom upon a twelve-year-old girl.

Now, watching her own grandson chase fireflies across the lawn, Margaret understood what the Sphinx truly knew. We begin crawling, we stand tall in our prime, and we end leaning on canes and each other. The cable knit blanket her mother had made, now draped across her lap, had begun to unravel at the edges. Everything did, eventually.

But the fox moved on, and the grandchildren laughed, and the zombie movie droned on, and Margaret smiled. Some things were knotted tighter than time itself. Some riddles you answered not with words, but with the weight of a well-lived life.