West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Other creatures’ miracles don’t mean a thing when you’re still working on your own.

“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,”

with the hubris of a selfish boy with nothing behind and everything ahead, I said, “I can do it.”

but oh, those sky-high eyes of theirs. They’ve seen the world.”

Are your eyes reading these words? Has this story found the precious likes of you?

my heart swelling full and warm and pure and kind in a way I’d clean forgotten it could. I was lost in it, its surging tenderheartedness taking my breath clean away.

The first time a poor soul gets a bit of grace in his wretched life, especially from a man who, by his own pronouncements, abides no chicanery, it’s a hard thing to recognize let alone accept, and even harder to trust.

“I keep thinking I’m saying goodbye to you.” She squeezed my arm. “Everything holds a goodbye someday, Woody.

“Home’s not the place you’re from, Woody. Home’s the place you want to be.”

The land you grow up in is a forever thing, remembered when all else is forgotten, whether it did you right or did you wrong.

trying not to think about how dirt is dirt and mud is mud and rivers create mountains by rushing and roaring.

The thing about knowing you’re doing something for the last time is that it takes the joy right out of it. I’ve done lots of things for the last time in my long life, but I didn’t know it. This time I’d know it. The goodbyes were near

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own. In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

It is a foolish man who thinks stories do not matter—when in the end, they may be all that matter and all the forever we’ll ever know. So, shouldn’t you hear our story?