—inspired by a title by Martha McFerren
Well, it wasn’t exactly a road, it was
more of a choice she was trying to make,
but somehow calling it a road made it seem
more manageable. At first she had thought it
an ocean. But that required a boat, and she
got seasick even on Lake Michigan, so for the sake
of success, she changed it to crossing a river,
but then even that seemed too hard, all that innuendo
of eddy and rapid and current and she remembered
the time when she nearly drowned, held beneath
the river’s surface for what, in the end, was not
long enough to see her life flash by. No, she thought,
not a river. Perhaps a great divide. But she was,
quite honestly, in a bit of a hurry, and the mountain pass
just seemed too hard. A road, she thought, yes,
a country road. A dirt road with not a car in sight. Not even
a bike. Perhaps a mailbox on the other side, with a little metal
red flag that she could put up just to prove that she’d done it,
but the flag was stuck and refused to budge and she
got so mad at the whole metaphor that she turned the road
into a path and just kept walking its length,
one foot in front of the other.