Two roads diverged.
I learned that poem before I had even gotten my feet dirty from hiking. It slid the slender notion into my newly tilled mind that choices appear like country roads. I was in middle school, reciting for the joy of a lilting walk of words. It had not occurred to me to notice that my own parents had
followed a convoluted path of five careers and four states. They were Adults Who Knew the Way. Changing direction was not about uncertainty, but rather the unavoidable backlash of Getting Where They Were Going.
It startles me to have unearthed the well kept secret that they were wandering as much as John and I have in our thirty seven years. His parents were literal enough to name their last child Wanderer, or Wendy for
short.
The Children of Israel diverged in their journey through the wilderness. The direction veered without warning when the pillar of fire spluttered off across the desert. Moses could not click on mapquest to pinpoint the succession of steps between them and the promised land. Having lived as slaves in Egypt for the duration of their days on earth, none of them had the slimmest picture of their destination, and Google Earth had not yet been
launched.
The pillar that is guiding me is a blaze too. John and I are escorted by a fiery love that has not failed to ignite our night sky, even when it is the size of a retreating star. It alternates between dormancy and flight, and I have a penchant for straining my neck to long for the tempo not currently in place.
But I have less angst about following a road whose end stretches out of sight. If I were
to confine my horizons to the landscape available to me at age thirteen I would have never left the back yard.
