Thursday, May 31, 2018

MY ROAD

                                                            

Each day I walk the road from my house, to the highway with my dog Molly so we get some exercise. It’s the same road I used to walk with another dog Gus, for fourteen years. It’s a road that has proven to have many benefits, beyond getting my heart rate up. It’s for me, a time to enjoy Mother Nature and the serenity that is there. Over the years I have seen, deer, bears, skunks, porcupines and you name it. Over the years I have sorted out so many thoughts and memories. I walked and cried when my wife died. I walked alone for the first time when Gus died and Molly and I have had so many interesting conversations, although she’s not much of a talker. But what has really been the most important thing to me are the conversations I have had with friends and neighbors that stopped to chat with me. People that I would never had seen, if I hadn’t been on that road.

I once met a woman in the winter that was collecting dead sticks and wood for her stove. I never realized that in this day and age someone would have to do that, just to heat her home. I sent her to my house and an old woodpile that was in my shed that would never be used. She was doing me a favor by taking it. I have met so many people on the road looking for directions, even though the road is only two miles long and a dead end. I once met a man who asked me how to get to Nisswa. I asked him why he was looking for Nisswa on this road and he told me, “I’m not. I’m just looking for someone who knows how to get to Nisswa.”

When I first moved up here the road was new and smooth as a baby’s behind. But old age and wear and tear has done the same thing to it, as old age has done to my surface. Left it full of cracks and bumps. My aunt use to call all those wrinkles she had in her old age laugh lines. My dad told her nothing was that funny. They didn’t get along very well. The road has such a crown on it that when you walk, your one foot is several inches lower then the other. So when you walk back you have to stay on the same side of the road so you even your body back out again. Once in my younger drinking days in Staples, the town where I grew up, I walked home from the local watering hole slightly inebriated. I couldn’t figure out why I was limping badly until I found out I was walking with one foot in the gutter. Molly’s got it all figured out she just stays in the ditch and away from traffic.

That’s what life is all about; a walk down a long proverbial road. For many years we walk holding on to our guardians hand. We didn’t get to choose the road and at first that was okay but as we age we yearn to find our own way. Its not that the road we were brought up on was necessarily a bad road; instead being naturally inquisitive we realize that unless we chart our own course in life, we can’t take credit for the path we walked. It will always be some ones else’s choice that we just participated in and like old Frank sang so many times, we want it to be, “My Way.” But all roads have one thing in common. They have an end. A place where you can go no farther. There was a time in life when we could just turn around and start over but that ship has sailed. There is some solace though to be had in all of this. Most of us will never realize where the end of the road really is.


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