What the Sphinx Knows

Every evening at sunset, I sit on my garden bench beside the stone sphinx Arthur brought back from Egypt in 1972. He'd been so proud of that statue—its weathered face, its winged lion body, the way it seemed to guard our little plot of earth in suburban Ohio.

"Patricia," he'd say, "that sphinx has seen five thousand years. It knows something about waiting."

Arthur's been gone seven years now, but his lessons keep coming back like those zombie roses by the fence—the ones I planted when we first moved in, the ones that die back every winter and return every spring, more stubborn than hope itself.

Our grandson Michael helped me tend them yesterday. At twenty-five, he has the same bull-headed determination Arthur had—the kind that makes you worry and makes you proud all at once. He's starting his own business, despite everyone telling him to wait, to be practical, to find something safer.

"I have to try, Grandma," he said, kneeling in the dirt with me. "Grandpa would understand."

The sphinx seemed to smile in the afternoon light. Perhaps it did understand. After all, it had watched empires rise and fall, lovers meet and part, generations bloom and fade.

I reached over and touched the orange peel Michael had left on the stone—Florida juice, his childhood favorite, a small connection to the boy who used to chase fireflies in this yard while Arthur sat here with his newspaper.

Some things, I've learned, don't really leave us. They just change form. The zombie roses return each spring. The sphinx keeps its vigil. The bull-stubborn son has a grandson just like him. And love—love is the orange sunset that paints the sky, brief but burning bright, before it returns again the next evening.

The old stone guard has watched it all. Five thousand years of sunsets, and still it waits.

And somehow, in this small garden that holds everything I've loved, I understand what Arthur meant. The sphinx knows that what matters isn't the waiting itself—it's what we plant while we wait.