West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened. —Anatole France, Nobel Laureate, 1921

Woodrow Wilson Nickel died in the year 2025, on a usual day, in the usual way, at the rather unusual age of 105.

I’m older than dirt. And when you’re older than dirt, you can get lost in time, in memory, even in space.

Back then, you got no warning. You’d notice a storm over the water and you’d be worrying how bad that cloud looks when the banshee wind and rain hits and you’re scrambling for your life.

Technology has come a long way and something i think can be easily take for granted

Because the last thing you think you’re going to see in the middle of flipped boats and buildings afire and bodies dangling and sirens wailing is a couple of giraffes.

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.

other began. Like they couldn’t much believe they were alive and

When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, that’s all life is—you’re nothing but a feral thing chasing your hunger every minute of the day.

There’s nothing more pitiful than a wandering creature who was never meant to be wild.

“Animals are complete all on their own, living by voices we don’t get to hear, having a knowing far beyond our paltry ken.

This world of misery is in dire need of some natural wonder to learn secrets to life from.”

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

So many news articles with my birthday

My birthday

There’s no taking the giraffes out of the rig, because once they’re out, there’s no guarantee we’d ever get ’em back in, and that’d be the death of them one way or the other.

If the gold coin looked like John D. Rockefeller to my orphan eyes, then that roll of bills looked like Fort Knox.

There are far more salvations than the kind you find in church, and I was in need of one right then to save me from myself.

For the first and last time in my life, though, not being able to make a choice was the right choice.

“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.

Even when it invades your dreams and stokes your nightmares. Even when you run from it never to return,

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.