What the Summer Knew

On the porch where I've sat each evening for forty years, I watched my granddaughter Emma arrange the small bottles on the side table. Each morning she brings them—her little rituals of care. A vitamin D capsule because my bones remember more winters than they should. Calcium because, as she says, 'You're building legacy, Grandma, not just breaking down.'

She brushes my white hair with gentle strokes, the same way my mother did hers. I told her once, 'Child, you spend too much time on an old woman's vanity.' She smiled and said, 'It's not vanity. It's listening to your stories. Every white hair earned its place.'

That reminds me of Grandfather's old bull, Buster—that magnificent creature who taught me more about patience than any preacher. Buster wouldn't be rushed. You could pull, you could plead, you could promise him the sweetest clover in the valley, but when Buster decided to move, Buster moved. Grandfather would lean on the fence and say, 'There's wisdom in knowing what you won't do, even more than in knowing what you will.'

I try to tell Emma this wisdom, but she lives in a world that won't wait for Buster. She runs from job to boyfriend to coffee date, breathless and beautiful and entirely too hurried.

'The riddles,' I tell her, 'are the whole point of it.' She looks at me like I've gone soft in the head. 'Like the Sphinx,' I explain. 'You know the story—Oedipus answered her riddle about what walks on four legs, then two, then three. But the real riddle isn't the answer. It's why we keep asking.'

Emma pauses, her hand still on my hair. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean that we're all the Sphinx's creature, child. We crawl, we walk proud, we lean. But the real wisdom is knowing that the walking proud part is the shortest chapter.'

She kisses my forehead then, and I feel what I felt when Grandfather explained Buster's stubbornness—that someone older has handed you the key to the mystery, but whether you'll use it is up to you.

The evening sun settles over the garden. Emma pours tea. I take my vitamins. Outside, somewhere beyond the porch, life continues its stubborn, beautiful charge, asking its riddles, and I have lived long enough to know that the asking is what makes us human. That, and the love that sits beside us, brushing our white hair while we remember.