West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

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.

I loved some respectable women and some not so much. I married three, all redheads, you might not be surprised to hear, and I outlived them all.

The closest I had to a child of my own was a grown stepdaughter, gone now, too, who once gave me a plaque that said “Time spent with animals is added to your life,” joking how I’d live to be a hundred, if that isn’t a kicker.

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.

If they can go extinct, dear God Almighty, let me go extinct too! I was desperate to be gone—graveyard gone—fearing, like always, I’d just keep on living.

Then, for the first time in eighty years, I dreamed.

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.

Shouldn’t you know your mother’s brave heart and daring dreams? And shouldn’t you know your friends, even though we’re gone?

Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes, one that didn’t kick me dead and one that saved my worthless orphan life and your worthy, precious one.

So, here and now, before it’s too late, I have written it down. If there is any magic left in a world without gentle giraffes, if that bit of God I saw in those sky-high wonders is still alive somewhere holy and true, a good soul will read these pencil scratches of mine and do this last thing I cannot do.

And one bright and blessed morning, the giraffes, the Old Man, me—and your ma—will find our winding way forever to you.

I start to ask the darling why she’s back. But, as my heart misses a beat . . . then another . . . and . . . another . . . I know. I drink in my final look of my true friend as she fades away. Goodbye.

Shaky hand to old, old heart, I smile down at these last scribbles. Time to stop. Time to go . . . . . . and I reach over and close the window.