West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.

whenever I locked eyes with an animal I felt something more soulful than I ever felt from the humans I knew, and what I saw in that sprawled giraffe’s eye made me ache to the bone.

“Life is life no matter who or what is living it, boy—a thing to respect,” he said. “You don’t get that, then you’re just a waste of skin.”

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.

Like they say, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. But that never kept a beggar from wishing.

“There’s no explaining the world, boy. How you come into it. Where you find yourself. Or who your friends turn out to be—be you man or be you beast.”

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.