Believe

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."
-E.E. Cummings

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The road not taken veers off to the left behind me, choked with rhododendrons and mountain laurels. It's not that I never noticed it before. I passed this way coming home every day for eleven years of my life. I rode my bicycle past it a hundred times each summer as my sister and I raced around the block. Our world was bounded by this circular cul-de-sac in the wooded slopes of Mount Misery. I'd never though about it much, that the road might lead somewhere, or have a name. We merely passed it by and Halloween weed walk right past without a word from Mrs. Merchant to the Acker's house where my sister's best friend lived. If I had know the crumbling tar and gravel lead to some other place, I would have gone there, and I'm sure I went everywhere else that I could have. Growing up as I did in an old stone house surrounded by trees made the impulse to explore very strong. I wandered around the old Krup house, abandoned since his death, and found the secret garden in the back, burgeoning with daffodils and tulips planted by his wife I guess, many years before my birth. I wandered in the thick laurel and dogwood that sloped away behind the mulberry tree in our back yard. There was an old oak there whose roots curled around to make a basin lined with moss and even in the dry summer months this pool sparkled with dark water I was afraid to touch. Far bellow that I followed the ravine down to where it opened out onto the harbor beach and an artesian spring trickled out across the sand next to a weathered stone wall where some one had built a bonfire some time in the past month.
I was always alone then, there seems no reason I would have not gone up that road. I can't remember any thing about it except the parting glance I had just before we moved away. I asked myself where does that go?
Now years later I can see what I did not know. The maps reveal that little has changed over all this time, I can see how different my life would have been If I had known the short cut to Diane's house. But then would that first kiss and that last good by have been as sweet, if I could have gotten there in just ten minutes instead of an hours ride up to the ridge and then around the golf course?

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